In 1816 England officially abandoned bimetallism and made silver coins into tokens that were only limited legal tender. Earlier monetary authorities had lacked the ability to manage a subsidiary coinage, a necessary complement to the monometallic gold standard. A successful token coinage must be both costly to counterfeit and credibly backed to ensure that the tokens do not depreciate to their intrinsic value. These problems were solved in the nineteenth century through the introduction of steam-driven stamping presses and with the assistance of the Bank of England.

Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental” values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that the stocks making up the S & P composite were priced at least 30 percent above fundamentals in late summer, 1929.

In 1940 the Ford Motor Company employed half of the black men in Detroit but only 14 percent of the whites. We find that black Detroiters were concentrated at Ford because they were excluded from working elsewhere. Those most affected were young married black men. A Ford job was virtually the only opportunity they had to earn a family wage; but to keep it, they had to put out the extra effort that Ford required. White married men in Detroit had better employment opportunities elsewhere, so they tended to avoid Ford or leave very quickly.

International, rather than domestic, causes of both the Bank Holiday of 1933 and the calm in the banking system that followed are emphasized here. New information on gold losses by the New York Federal Reserve, rather than domestic currency hoarding, serve to explain the Bank Holiday's specific timing. Expectations that Roosevelt would devalue the dollar stimulated much of the gold loss. I also argue that Roosevelt's restrictions on gold holdings and foreign exchange dealings and his devaluation of the dollar by 60 percent were more important to the stability of the banking system after the Bank Holiday than was deposit insurance.

This article analyzes the ownership structures and governance institutions of New York's corporations in the 1820s, using a new dataset collected from the records of the state's 1823 capital tax, and from the corporate charters. In contrast to Berle and Means's account of the development of the corporation, the results indicate that many firms were dominated by large shareholders, who were represented on the firms' boards, and held sweeping power to utilize the firms' resources for their own benefit. To address this problem, many firms configured their voting rights in a way that curtailed the power of large investors.

It has been widely believed that demand elements, jointly with supply shifts, were crucial in determining the timing, location, and general characteristics of the Industrial Revolution in England and Continental Western Europe. The possible forms which the role of demand might have taken are specified and examined both theoretically and empirically. While demand factors cannot be ruled out altogether, they were definitely of a secondary order of importance. Neither exogenous increases in the demand for manufactures, nor induced technological change are likely to have been a factor of decisive importance. A macroeconomic interpretation of the “demand hypothesis” is examined and rejected.

The study of mortality rates and trends in the United States before 1860 has been rather unsystematic to date. Most scholars have been content to estimate the mortality rate at some point in time and only a few serious efforts have been made to ascertain the long-term trends in mortality. Particularly lacking are efforts to relate estimates of mortality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to those of the nineteenth century. In addition, the few studies that have attempted to discuss long-term trends in American mortality have been forced to rely on estimates of mortality gathered from different sources and based on different techniques of analysis. Unfortunately, almost no efforts have been made to estimate possible biases introduced when comparing mortality data from different types of records.

Even after controlling for local economic conditions, differences in supervision and regulation help explain the large variation in state bank suspension rates across U.S. counties during the Great Depression. More stringent capital requirements lowered suspension rates whereas laws prohibiting branch banking and imposing high reserve requirements raised them. States whose bank supervisors could liquidate banks minimized contagion and credit-channel dislocations and experienced lower suspension rates. Those that gave their supervisors sole authority to issue bank charters and granted their supervisors long terms strengthened the incentives for bank lobbyists to influence supervisory decisions and consequently experienced higher rates of suspension.

This article studies the employment effects of one of the largest forced population movements in history, the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II. This episode of forced mass migration provides a unique setting to study the causal effects of immigration. Expellees were not selected on the basis of skills or labor market prospects and, as ethnic Germans, were close substitutes to native West Germans. Expellee inflows substantially reduced native employment. The displacement effect was, however, highly nonlinear and limited to labor market segments with very high inflow rates.

Long-distance trade depends crucially on the enforcement of long-distance contracts, those in which principals are significantly removed from agents. The problem of contract enforcement in the English East India Company reflected a multi-task principal-agent problem in which servants traded publicly for the company and at the same time conducted their own private trade. Private trade, sustained by the private use of company resources, and dismissals were the mechanisms that made East India contracts work. Mechanisms that served little purpose were salaries and pre-employment bonds.

Although largely neglected in most histories of the French Revolution, the central government’s persistent budget deficit was a factor of paramount importance. The fiscal crisis inherited from the monarchy defied solution because of the war of attrition fought by economic interest groups. The struggle produced radical changes in macroeconomic policy to shift the burden of adjustment, altering the course of and prolonging the Revolution.

Indian society is one of the most complex in existence, and we know little about its structure, functioning, or—more important—its development and dynamics. The neglect of Indian's economic history, particularly the period 1800–1947, is one of the most distressing gaps. It is dismaying to realize that even within very broad ranges of error we do not know whether during the past century-and-a-half the economy's performance improved, stagnated, or actually declined. Not only is ignorance of Indian economic behavior over time disturbing in itself, but the attempts at planning since 1947 have suffered because of this. It is difficult to predict outcome and consequences of any major development policy in the absence of any clear clues about the long-run dynamics of the Indian economy and society.

The U.S. Constitution, by taking away the power of the states to issue paper money, removed a major source of flexibility in state public finance. In their search for new sources of revenue and fiscal flexibility, the states discovered that the banks they chartered could fill the gap. Investment earnings and tax revenues derived from banks soon became major elements of state public finance. We discuss the nature of these early business-government relationships and provide the first systematic assessment of their relative importance in state finance.

This article documents differences in body size between white, black, and Indian mid-nineteenth-century American men and investigates the socioeconomic and demographic determinants of frame size using a unique data set of Civil War soldiers. It finds that over time men have grown taller and heavier and have relatively less abdominal fat, implying that “modern” chronic diseases such as ischemic heart disease were common in the past. Changes in frame size explain almost half of the mortality decline among white men between 1914 and 1988 and predict even sharper declines in older age mortality between 1988 and 2022.

The journals of slave ship surgeons of the 1790s are used to address questions on the relative importance of African conditions versus those on ships, crowding, the effectiveness of Dolben's Act, and the interaction between slave and crew health. In contrast with previous work we find that most slaves who died did so near the middle of the voyage. Crowding was important to health and mortality, but the restrictions of Dolben's Act did little to reduce losses. The crew was largely isolated from patterns of disease among slaves.

Earlier accounts of the creation of property rights in the California gold fields ignored culture and are incomplete. We argue that culture matters in solving collective-action problems. Such problems in the California gold fields were solved through reliance on cultural focal points. Focal points included individualism, equality, respect for property, and rewards commensurate to work. Cultural concepts of fairness served to create norms and institutions that miners were willing to defend, which included majority rule, election of officials, trial by jury, allocation of a first-come, first-served basis and rules for working claims.

This article examines how the marine insurance industry evolved in Britain and America during its critical formative period, focusing on the information asymmetries and agency problems that were inherent to the technology of overseas trade at the time, and on the path-dependent manner in which the institutions that addressed these problems evolved. I argue that the market was characterized by multiple equilibria because of a potential lemons problem. Exogenous shocks and endogenous institutional development combined to bring about a bifurcation of institutional structure, the effects of which persist to the present day.

Recent historical research tends to view the 1848 revolutions in Europe as caused by a surge of radical ideas and by long-term socioeconomic problems. However, many contemporary observers interpreted much of the upheaval as a consequence of short-term economic causes, specifically the serious shortfall in food supply that had shaken large parts of the Continent in 1845–1847, and the subsequent industrial slump. Applying standard quantitative methods to a data set of 27 European countries, we show that it was mainly immediate economic misery, and the fear thereof, that triggered the European revolutions of 1848.

The boll weevil is America's most celebrated agricultural pest. We analyze new county-level panel data to provide sharp estimates of the time path of the insect's effects on the southern economy. We find that in anticipation of the contact, farmers increased production, attempting to squeeze out one last large crop. Upon arrival, the weevil had a large negative and lasting impact on cotton production, acreage, and especially yields. In response, rather than taking land out of agricultural production, farmers shifted to other crops. We also find striking effects on land values and population movements.

What do economic historians do? I analyze quantitatively The Journal of Economic History's contents since its founding, showing subfields, nations, and periods studied, and which scholars and universities have contributed. The timing, extent, and participants of the cliometric revolution are investigated. New rankings of economic history programs are made.