I find that childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, adversely impacted later-life human capital—especially when exposure was in utero—increasing poverty and disability rates, and decreasing fertility and college completion rates. The event's devastation of agriculture, however, had the beneficial effect of increasing high school completion, likely by pushing children who otherwise might have worked on the farm into secondary schooling. Lastly, New Deal spending helped remediate Dust Bowl damage, suggesting that timely and substantial policy interventions can aid in human recovery from natural disasters.

A literature has developed recently to analyze the disruptive effects on small, open economies of a sudden change in the value of their natural resources. The paper looks to that literature to explain the effect on the Australian colonies of the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the 1850s. The price and quantity adjustments predicted by the model are found to be well supported by the historical experience with one important exception. Immigration played a far greater role in the Australian case than has been suggested in the theoretical literature. The model does, however, allow for a compact description of the confusing decade in Australian history and explains a number of previously unconnected phenomena.

The existence of property rights affects the allocation and distribution of economic resources. The exclusive rights to ownership and control over assets leads to a different level and pattern of economic activity than would occur if these assets remained unowned or “common property.” While property rights are frequently subject to various constraints imposed by law or custom, within these bounds owners are free to use their resources to achieve their desired ends. Resources may be sold in an exchange of property rights, rented for a specified time period in exchange for some quid pro quo, or employed (or kept idle) by the owner himself. The owner's welfare function will include the income (or other utility) derived from use of the resource, while, for purposes of measuring national income, the final consumption of the entire population would be included.

Cameroon was partitioned between France and the United Kingdom after WWI and then reunited after independence. I use this natural experiment to investigate colonial legacies in education, using a border discontinuity analysis of historical census microdata from 1976. I find that men born in the decades following partition had, all else equal, one more year of schooling if they were born in the British part. This positive British effect disappeared after 1950, as the French increased education expenditure, and because of favoritism in school supply towards the Francophone side after reunification. Using 2005 census microdata, I find that the British advantage resurfaced more recently: Cameroonians born after 1970 are more likely to finish high school, attend a university, and have a high-skilled occupation if they were born in the former British part. I explain this result by the legacy of high grade repetition rates in the French-speaking education system and their detrimental effect on dropout.

The concentration of business enterprise in corporate structures at the end of the last century called the attention of scholars to the history of the business corporation, the chartered joint-stock company. Even those who agreed that “the honour of originally inventing these political constitutions entirely belongs to the Romans” realized that their modern economic functions were relatively recent and demanded explanation. In this country, Williston's brilliant essay, the studies of Simeon Baldwin, and a number of other investigations probed into the origin and nature of the institution at about the period when it became a pressing social issue.

A number of hypotheses attempt to disentangle the “true” causes of the Panic of 1837 from domestic and international factors that came into play as the crisis approached. I analyze U.S. government documents and contemporary newspapers to reconsider the role of domestic factors. These sources place neither the official distribution of the federal surplus nor an international shock at the center. Rather, a series of interbank transfers of government balances and a policy-induced increase in the demand for coin in the Western states drained the largest New York City banks of their specie reserves and rendered the panic inevitable.

Throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century cane sugar was produced on plantations, most frequently with either slave labor or, after slavery was ended, with contract laborers brought in from other low-income countries. This paper details the diverse sources and recipients of nineteenth-century contract labor movements, relating them to political and economic factors. Shifts in the ethnic composition of the plantation labor force are indicated. Late nineteenth- century transitions in the nature of sugar production are noted, and questions raised about their implications for the study of the relations between institutional and technological changes.

This article uses 1937 and 1940 Census data to estimate the effect that hiring an additional relief worker in a county had on unemployment statistics for that county. The fundamental estimation problem arises because one cannot easily control for economic conditions that influenced both the number of individuals holding relief jobs and the number counted as jobless.

The technological backwardness of the British cotton industry in the first six decades of this century was due primarily to the structure of industrial organization, characterized by intense competition and specialization, that had developed in the nineteenth century when the industry had no serious international competitors. But with the rise of corporate economies, particularly in Japan and the United States, this structure of industrial organization rendered British cotton managers powerless to create the corporate structures required to meet this challenge. Britain's decline was due to the failure of its managers to create conditions for new profitable opportunities by altering the constraints that they faced.

Loan repudiations and property confiscations were common between medieval kings and individuals. Traditional accounts of these confiscations focus on factors affecting the kings, ignoring the motivations of the victims. This deficiency may be remedied by considering the problems faced on both sides of any agreement between a king and a group of citizens. A model is presented which explains the timing and the form of repudiations and confiscations without resorting to an assumption of irrationality by either party. It is general enough to address a persistent problem in the property rights view of government: How can an individual protect himself from abuses by his protector?

The relative dynamism of English and Scottish foreign trade from 1675 to 1775 can largely be explained by the interrelated phenomena of the growing domestic demand for American and Asian consumer goods and North European raw materials; the growing market in northern and western Europe for re-exports of American and Asian consumables; and the growing protected market for British manufactures in the American colonies and Africa. Trade growth depended on development of a wide variety of credit practices, supported primarily by big wholesalers and export merchants. Wholesalers and merchants also accounted for important institutional innovations.

During the late nineteenth century, competition from cheap American grains undermined agricultural economies across Europe. This article investigates how similar forces of globalization in the production of Mediterranean fruits and nuts dampened economic prospects across southern Europe and in some cases contributed to outright economic and political crises.

Two revolutions in American agriculture reflect the impact of technological change on farming during the past century. The first revolution saw the change from manpower to animal power, and centered about the Civil War. The second revolution saw the change from animal power to mechanical power and the adaptation of chemistry to agricultural production. It centered around the post-World War II period. The transition from animal power to mechanical power is virtually complete. In 1962, the Statistical Reporting Service of the United States Department of Agriculture discontinued reporting the number of horses and mules on farms. They were no longer of significance to farm production.

Progressive Ear and New Deal reformers claimed that industrialization impoverished the elderly by degrading older workers. This has become the standard interpretation in popular and scholarly accounts. Data from 1890 through 1950 show that real wages of older workers rose sharply during this peroid and that family economic strategies promised the elderly considerable security. Birth cohort analysis indicates positive age-earnings profiles across the life cycle. Although the elderly benefited from economic growth, security in old age often demanded intrafamilial exchanges. Tensions arising from these transfers may explain the broad popular support Social Security received.

The introduction of segregation laws for municipal streetcars is examined. The economics of private and public segregation is analyzed first, taking note of the particular features of the streetcar industry, followed by a discussion of the contemporary debates on streetcar segregation laws in a number of southern cities. The evidence presented suggests that segregation laws were binding constraints and not simply the codification of customary practice. Furthermore, the streetcar companies were not the initiators of segregation and sometimes actively resisted it. These findings are related to several major interpretations of the origins of segregation.

An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the Industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, industrial development conformed to a pattern of Smithian growth, as manufacturers diversified their output in response to an expanding domestic market for consumer goods.

Relying on a large sample of private and public loan contracts taken from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the private borrowers and lenders who participated in the credit market between 1690 and 1840. It explains the important role notaries played in the market, describes the types of loans available to borrowers and lenders, stresses the importance of the life cycle in explaining the recourse to indebtedness, and ends with a discussion of the difficulties lenders had in assessing creditworthiness.

This study uses evidence from central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they affected by social constraints on women? It finds that people in central Europe did desire to increase market work and consumption. But elites used the social capital of traditional institutions to oppose new work and consumption practices, especially by women, migrants, and the poor. Although they seldom blocked new practices wholly, they delayed them, limited them socially, and increased their costs.

Based on British and American primary sources, this article analyzes Anglo-American differences in the reconstruction of the international monetary order. London wanted a worldwide gold exchange standard to bolster its relatively weak financial position. The U.S. pushed instead for the gold standard. Winston Churchill returned to the gold standard largely because he feared economic isolation from the Dominions, especially South Africa, which had accepted private American advice to return regardless of Britain. Anglo-American wrangling continued over the Genoa proposals, loan regulation and war debts. Heavy gold exports were a primary factor in Federal Reserve rate increases in early 1928.