Early North American railways chose different track gauges partly on the basis of differing engineering traditions and partly for mutual compatibility. The resulting dynamic process produced nine district common-guage regions by the 1860s. Growing demand for interregional traffic and increasing among railways yielded incentives to resolve this diversity, and the specific regional pattern of gauges led to selection pf 4'8.5” as the continental standard. The case offers support for aspects of differing views on the role of path dependence in determining features of the economy.

This article investigates women's position in early modem Bohemia by focusing on female household headship, which was very low by European standards. Empirical analysis suggests that the factors hypothesized in the literature as influencing female economic independence in preindustrial Europe had little effect in Bohemia. Instead, it appears that the decline in female headship between 1591 and 1722 was a consequence of the growing power of landlords under the “second serfdom.” Not only did landlords eject female heads as poor fiscal risks, but landlord decisions were also manipulated by village communities and individual serfs for their own ends.

Understanding industrial decline is important from both historical and policy perspectives. The United States was the world's leading producer of gum naval stores in the early twentieth centuiy, but by the late 1970s production had all but ceased. Evidence presented here indicates that changing relative prices induced forest owners, the key stakeholders, to shift production towards other forest products. Nevertheless, the federal government continued to provide transfers to this industry even as political support for it vanished. The demise of this once-great American industry lends support to the received notion that once instituted, transfer programs tend to persist.

We use the Soviet state and party archives to study the creation of the Soviet financial system. Although its framers intended to centralize all emission and monitoring of money and credit, in practice the system was characterized by informal mechanisms involving multiple players, soft budget constraints, and massive moral hazards. Enterprises issued “illegal” commercial credits and surrogate monies, causing liquidity growth to far outpace real economic activity. When confronted with the choice of solvency versus plan fulfillment, firms always chose the latter: credit risks were passed on to solvent enterprises, the state bank, and the state budget.

In 1791 the $10 million capitalization of the First Bank of the United States was vastly greater than the combined capital of all other banks. The Bank had an enormous impact on the economy within two months of opening its doors for business by flooding the market with its discounts and banknotes and then sharply reversing course and curtailing liquidity. Although the added liquidity initially helped push a rising securities market higher, the subsequent drain caused the first U.S. securities market crash by forcing speculators to sell their stocks. Several reasons are analyzed for the Bank's credit restriction.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the inflationary exeriences of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, applying theories about money and government budget constraints in the manner of Thomas Sargent and François Velde. The comparison looks beyond economic policy itself to the political and social consequences of the two inflationary crises. The parallel is fairly close: close enough to suggest that Russia, despite its recent quiescence, may not have seen the end of its monetary—or political—travails.

I examine the evolution of conflict and cooperation during economic growth by analyzing civil disputes in New South Wales between 1860 and 1900. Disputes per capita fell over time and the proportion of cases settled before trial increased, but patterns varied across locations and types of disputes. Economic conflicts were likelier to be settled than personal disputes, and the fraction of cases settled was significantly lower in frontier areas and in districts without access to transportation. The results suggest that increased market exchange facilitates the development of informal rules and encourages transactors to find cooperative solutions through private bargaining.