The paper focuses on U.S. foreign investment. Part I notes its trivial impact on returns to U.S. capital and considers its greater importance for five industry groups. Part II reviews the economic advantages accruing to U.S. citizens from interventions in Panama and Cuba. Part III, the bulk of the paper, asks what impact U.S. foreign investment had on Latin American factor returns. It finds no evidence in the anti-imperialist literature for the assertions that such investment cut labor incomes or landowners’ capital gains in these nations. It suggests that a struggle between two groups of capitalists, native and foreign, was more central to the economic aspects of “imperialist” conflict.

Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry.

… O, wot een gulden Neeringh

en voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh;

hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft en

winnende sijn brood God dank en eere gheeft.

In spite of the importance accorded the steam engine during nineteenth-century industrialization, little is known about its rate of diffusion and the determinants thereof in the United States. The primary purpose of this paper is to enhance our knowledge about the spread of this technology. New evidence on steam power use in 1820, 1850, and 1860, combined with published census data from 1870, permits quantitative estimates of the regional variations in timing, pace, and extent of usage before 1900. Second, we advance reasonable conjectures for the regional differences that appear. Although lack of evidence precludes a definitive delineation of causality, with simulation techniques we are able to use the limited evidence available on costs to reconcile, albeit imperfectly, the historical pattern with economic-theoretic predictions regarding the process of innovation.

The steel industry of Wilhelminian Germany is especially known for its tariff protection; its anti-competitive collusion, and the rapid increases of its productivity and its output. This study analyzes the interdependence of these four phenomena. The tariffs and cartels were directly symbiotic in providing protection, which had substantial redistributive effects in favor of larger firms. The restriction of competition by tariffs and cartels may have contributed to the productivity advances of the German steel industry by reducing the riskiness of capital-intensive technologies. Productivity increases made a major contribution to the industry's growth.

This paper investigates the decline and regional differential in antebellum southern white fertility using published census materials and the 1860 population schedules. Demographic analysis is conducted with a synthetic total fertility rate that has four components: age at first birth, age at last surviving birth, surviving-child spacing, and the proportion of women who eventually have surviving children. The socioeconomic analysis employs regressions and focuses on causes of the underlying changes in the components. Family limitation appears to have been unimportant in this population. The distribution of wealth was.probably an important factor shaping the time trend and regional differential in fertility.

From the 1830s on Syria and Palestine exported monetary metal to pay for an import surplus. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a concomitant inflationary process. The apparent contradiction is resolved by a theoretical argument and by reference to the dual nature of the Ottoman monetary system. Government-induced inflation in terms of the domestic (token and paper) money reinforced the rising price of full-bodied coins, caused by the adverse balance of trade.

This note contrasts the familial origins of 136 Jewish American entrepreneurs with those of 187 American non-Jewish entrepreneurs described in a previous study of mine. Information on both groups was drawn from published biographies. In addition, manuscript biographies were used to gather information on Jewish entrepreneurs.