The origins of the Italian North-South divide have always been controversial. We fill this gap by estimating a new dataset of real wages (Allen 2001; Allen et al. 2011) from Unification (1861) to WWI. Italy was very poor throughout the period, with a modest improvement since the late nineteenth century. This improvement started in the Northwest industrializing regions, while real wages in other macro-areas remained stagnant. The gap Northwest/South widened until the end of the period. Focusing on the drivers of regional trends, we find that human capital formation exerted strong positive effect on the growth of real wages.

State personal income per capita estimates at six census years are adjusted for state differences in prices and labor input per capita. Decomposition of the variation in state nominal income levels into the contributions of prices, demography, and (residual) labor productivity reveals considerable diversity in the relative importance of each by region and period. Convergence rates across the century differ according to the choice of series (nominal income, price-adjusted income, or productivity). The West and the South play crucial roles in regional convergence, but at different times.

The system of inside contracting has received little attention from economic historians despite its importance in the development of American industry. Although several authors have mentioned the system, none has described its operation in detail. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to remedy this omission and analyze the reasons for the elimination of the system, with particular reference to one manufacturing plant (Winchester Repeating Arms Company).

Historical events are reflected in asset prices. We analyze movements in the price of bonds issued by five European governments and traded on the Swiss bourse between 1928 and 1948, with special attention to the war years. Some war events that are generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices. This holds, in particular, for the official outbreak of the war and changes in national sovereignty. But other events to which historians attach great importance are not reflected in bond prices, most prominently Germany's capitulation in 1945.

Transportation improvements in the nineteenth century loom large in the historiography of the profession during the twentieth century. This article describes the ongoing construction of a historical geographic information systems (GIS) transportation database designed to provide new insights into the impact of the transportation and communications revolution in the continental United States by providing evidence on the spatial dimensions of those changes over time. It also reviews some preliminary findings and reinterpretations based upon these data.

Historically, lands of recent settlement have had a thirst for immigrants, but one that has been procyclical (negatively related to unemployment rates). For a period in the early 1980s, Australia's major political parties supported high immigration in spite of rising unemployment. This article explores the long-run relationship between immigration and local unemployment, posing the question, “Do migrants rob jobs?” It also seeks to apply long-run historical analysis to recent economic debate: would Australia's unemployment rate have been lower in very recent times without so many immigrants?

Douglass North and Barry Weingast's seminal account of the Glorious Revolution argued that specific constitutional reforms enhanced the credibility of the English Crown, leading to much stronger public finances. Critics have argued that the most important reforms occurred incrementally before the Revolution; and that neither interest rates on sovereign debt nor enforcement of property rights improved sharply after the Revolution. In this article, I identify a different set of constitutional reforms, explain why precedents for these reforms did not lessen their revolutionary impact, and show that the evidence, properly evaluated, supports a view of the Revolution as a watershed.

This article investigates sex-specific mortality rates in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury rural Germany to determine whether there was any gender bias in the allocation of household resources. Family reconstitution data from 60 villages provide evidence of considerable excess female mortality among married adults. The empirical findings are consistent with a bargaining approach to understanding intrahousehold resource allocation and suggest that women's survival disadvantage is related to their positions in the remarriage market, the perceived value of their work, as well as differences in altruism. Agricultural change appears to be one factor responsible for the emergence of this disadvantage.

Though the economy of Italy has been transformed in the one hundred years since its uninfication, the various regions have experienced quite different degrees of development. Southern Italy, including Sicily and Sardinia, all of which comprises 40 per cent of the land area and, today, about 37 per cent of the population, has lagged far behind the North.

The late Victorian era was characterized by close links between politicians and firms in the United Kingdom, with up to half of all members of Parliament serving as company directors. We analyze 467 British companies over the period 1895 to 1904. An analysis of election results shows that the election of a new tech director is associated with a 2 percent to 2.5 percent increase in that firm's share price, whereas old tech firms were unaffected by the electoral fortunes of their directors. New technology firms with political directors were more likely to undertake seasoned issues of both equity and debt.

Based on six sets of witnesses' accounts from the North of England and London over the period 1760 to 1830, new estimates of male labor input during the Industrial Revolution are derived. I present a new method of converting witnesses' activities into estimates of labor input, and derive confidence intervals. Working hours increased considerably. Moderate gains in per capita consumption during the Industrial Revolution have to be balanced against this decline in leisure. This adds further weight to pessimistic interpretations: I calculate that consumption per capita, adjusted for changes in leisure, remained essentially unchanged between 1760 and 1830.

Common property rights were widespread in English agriculture for at least 600 years. Since privatizing common fields allegedly produced huge profits in the eighteenth century, common land owners seemingly squandered 15 percent of potential income for generations. Ingenious explanations have been produced for this market failure. This article argues for a simple, brutal resolution. Common fields survived because enclosure was generally unprofitable before 1750, when changing relative prices made private property rights marginally more efficient. Then people responded quickly to modest profits. The rich gains from enclosure existed only in the imaginings of wild-eyed eighteenth century agrarian reformers.

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as in the Yangzi delta. Agricultural productivity there was at about the same level as in the Netherlands (and England), but large productivity gaps existed in industry and services. We attempt to explain this concluding that differences in factor costs are probably behind disparities in labor productivity.

Europeans have been coming to America and commenting about the nature of American technology for over a century. Despite the evident economic changes in the course of this century, the comments on the differences between American and European technology—or, more properly for the nineteenth century, on the differences between American and British technology—have stayed remarkably constant. The factors noted by a few British visitors of the 1850's, perhaps the first technically qualified foreign group to take a careful look at American manufacturing, still form the backbone of discussion today. Chief among the factors noted is the high cost of American labor, but this explanation of American peculiarities by no means stands alone.

In early modern Europe the major concern of many people was getting enough food to stay alive. The “problem of subsistence” varied considerably, however, between one country—or one region—and another. England, for instance, was free of major subsistence crises during the later seventeenth century, when France was hard hit by repeated and deadly famines. In this essay I shall point out some of the differences between these two countries that might explain the success of one and the failure of the other to feed its people.

Are firms with strong market positions powerful engines of technological progress? Joseph Schumpeter thought so, but his hypothesis has proved difficult to verify empirically. This article highlights Schumpeterian market-power and creative-destruction effects in a sample of early-twentieth-century U.S. industrial firms; his contention that an efficiently functioning capital market has a positive effect on the rate of innovation is also confirmed. Despite market power abuses by incumbents, the extent of innovation stands out: 21 percent of patents assigned to the firms sampled between 1920 and 1928 are cited in patents granted between 1976 and 2002.

When did Germany become economically integrated? Based on a large new data set on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe, 1885–1933. The key finding is that the German Empire before 1914 was a poorly integrated economy. This internal fragmentation resulted from cultural heterogeneity, from administrative borders, and from natural geography that divided Germany into eastern and western parts. After World War I and again with the Great Depression, internal integration improved, while external integration worsened in part because of border changes along the lines of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. By the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Germany was reasonably well integrated.

The last remaining gap in the national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century, 1913 to 1928, includes the Great War, the Civil War, and postwar recovery. Filling this gap, we find that the Russian economy did somewhat better in the Great War than was previously thought; in the Civil War it did correspondingly worse; war losses persisted into peacetime, and were not fully restored under the New Economic Policy. We compare this experience across regions and over time. The Great War and Civil War produced the deepest economic trauma of Russia's troubled twentieth century.

Africa and Latin America secured independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America by the 1820s and most of Africa by 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political instability, violent conflict, and economic stagnation lasting for about a half-century. The parallels suggest that Africa might be exiting from a period of postimperial collapse and entering one of relative political stability and economic growth, as did Latin America almost two centuries ago.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Britain was the major supplier of iron and steel to the world market, while Germany and the United States were substantial importers. But by 1913 German exports had exceeded British exports—with American exports not far behind—and Britain had become a major importer of steel. The goal of this paper is to explain this change in the pattern of trade. Its method is, first, to establish that the pattern of trade reflected the pattern of iron and steel prices prevailing in the three countries, and, second, to account for the pricing pattern in terms of international differences in input prices, technical efficiency, and deviations between price and unit production costs. I shall demonstrate that Britain's mid-century export success was due to its superior technical efficiency and lower raw material prices, and to the enormous excess profits earned by the German iron industry during its mid-century period of rapid economic growth. Britain's decline as an exporter was due to a reversal of this favorable situation: after 1900 the British industry was considerably less efficient than the German and American industries, and it labored under the burden of higher raw material prices. I shall argue, however, that vigorous entrepreneurs could have overcome both of these disadvantages.