This article reassesses the economic impact of Spanish railroads in 1850–1913, which has usually been considered to be substantially higher than in the most developed countries on the basis of the social saving methodology. The application of growth accounting techniques shows, by contrast, that the direct contribution of railroads to economic growth was lower in Spain than in the United Kingdom, mainly due to the low importance that railroad transport had within Spanish GDP before 1913.

When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servants were positively selected to American mainland colonies in terms of their unobservable human capital and negatively selected to the West Indies. Thus, the relative quality of migrants' human capital may have played a role in the subsequent relative economic performance of these regions.

We revisit the evidence on the relations between institutions, the cost of government debt, and financial development in Britain (1690–1790) and find that interest rates remained high and volatile for four decades after the Glorious Revolution, partly due to wars and instability; British interest rates co-moved with those in Holland; Debt per capita remained lower in Britain than in Holland until around 1780; and Britain did not borrow at lower rates than European countries with more limited protection of property rights. We conclude that, in the short run, institutional reforms are not rewarded by financial markets.

By the end of the Civil War 186,017 black men had served in the Union Army, roughly three-quarters of whom were former slaves. Because most black soldiers were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. Their wartime experience depended upon their peers, their commanding officers, and where their regiment toured and affected their later life outcomes. In the short run the combat units benefited from company homogeneity, which built social capital and minimized shirking, but in the long run men's human capital and acquisition of information was best improved by serving in heterogeneous companies.

The writing and allocation of French tax farm contracts changed dramatically after the Fronde (1648–1653): they were gradually transformed from small, competitively auctioned, units into a large cartel known as the Company of General Farms. Surprisingly, the crown's revenues increased. I present a transaction cost argument to explain the behavior of tax farm lease prices as tax farming changed during the seventeenth century. Cartelization of tax farms lowered costs faced by the crown. The tax farm system's evolution offers insights into how organizations evolve to protect their property rights in the absence of well functioning representative institutions.

This article investigates the impact of “learning-by-producing” on inventive activity. From 1870 to 1910, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak. Regional shifts in production did not lead to corresponding increases in invention. The location of inventive activity tended to mirror that of individuals with advanced technical skills appropriate to each industry. Consequently, scholars may have overemphasized the importance of learning-by-producing in accounting for geographic differences in inventive activity, and underestimated the significance of technical skills amongst the population.

In this article I provide a micro-level analysis of primary schooling in Victorian England. Using a new dataset of school-age males linked between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the determinants of childhood school attendance and the impact of attendance on adult labor market outcomes. I find that schooling had a positive effect on adult occupational class and that the associated wage gains were likely to have outweighed the cost of schooling. However, this effect was small relative to father's class, and the effect of education on earnings appears to have been small relative to modern results.