The purpose of this paper is to examine cost-of-living differences among the various regions of the United States during a thirty-year interval of the nineteenth century. We do this by constructing regional price indexes for the years 1851–1880 using two different base years for pur calculations, 1860 and 1880. The results indicate that the cost of living differed substantially among regions, and specifically that it was lower in the American Midwest than in the East. Although one might have expected these differences among regions to narrow as regional and national markets developed and improved, we find no evidence that they did during this thirty-year period.

We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was not sufficient for their success. The Danish legal system, which we compare to that of other countries, was also of crucial importance, along with the way in which rules were monitored and enforced. Of particular interest is the Danish cooperatives’ use of contracts, which we explore with evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources.

Several accounts have documented the difficult employment experiences of immigrants in manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century. A recent quantitative study, however, has asserted that wage differentials between immigrants and natives were the result of differences in skill, and not discrimination. We examine the same data on a less aggregative level, and our regression analysis indicates that the so-called “new” immigrants received lower wages than either “old” immigrants or natives—even after standardizing for worker skills and industry characteristics. An analysis of a second data set confirms the finding of discrimination.

The article sketches the history of Swedish commercial banking from 1656 until World War I, with special attention to the post-1850 period. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between economic growth and banking. International comparisons based on the quantitative measures developed by Rondo Cameron and Raymond Goldsmith are made. It is concluded that at all stages of its early industrialization Sweden had a remarkably large and efficient banking system. This, in turn, was largely the result of the general population's long experience with banking and paper money and their generally high levels of literacy and education.

We describe the transfer of patents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany using a new database containing information on 20,000 transactions. The number of transactions shows an upward trend, in total numbers and as a share of patents in force. About 8 percent of patents were transferred at least once during their existence. Many transactions involved the transfer of patents with an above-average quality from individual inventors to firms and to newly created firms. In addition, valuable patents were transferred between firms. About two-thirds of all transfers occurred during the first three years of a patents’ existence.

Untreated syphilis explained one-third of the higher prematurity rates of black relative to white babies born at Johns Hopkins in the early twentieth century. Differences in prematurity rates explained 41 percent of the black-white stillbirth gap and one-quarter of the black-white birth weight gap. Black babies had lower mortality and higher weight gain than white babies during the first ten days of life spent in the hospital because of higher black breast-feeding rates. Historically low birth weights may have a long reach: in 1988 maternal birth weight accounted for 5–8 percent of the gap in black-white birth weights.

Inflation in Germany from 1919 to 1923 resulted from the accumulation and the anticipation of government deficits. Inflationary expectations depended therefore on fiscal news. Allied demands for reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, and domestic revolts were important negative news and led to increased inflation. Tax reforms and eventually the end to government deficits were important positive news and ushered in periods of price stability. Political events were fiscal news as they changed the chances for the government to balance the budget.

A Striking disparity exists between India's ranking as a railway power and its ranking by any other modern economic category, such as coal mined, iron and steel produced, power generated, value added by all manufacturing, or national income received per capita. Throughout the twentieth century India has had one of the world's five largest railway systems, but by most other modern categories India's economy has been among the world's weakest and least developed. I propose to begin by recounting the way in which India's railway system was developed under British leadership in the century after 1850; then I intend to turn to some possible connections between the special types of railway organization that Britain sponsored in India and the relative lack of development of other sectors of India's economy, particularly modern industry.

This article analyzes the effects of parliamentary representation on road infrastructure expenditure during the Spanish Restoration. Using a panel data set of Spanish provinces in 1880–1914, we find that the allocation of administrative resources among provinces depended both on the delegation characteristics (such as the share of MPs with party leadership positions, and their degree of electoral independence), and the regime's global search for stability. These results point to the importance of electoral dynamics within semi-democratic political systems, and offer an example of the influence of government tactics on infrastructure allocation.

In the United States a century ago, working children turned over almost all of their earnings to their parents. What incentives, then, did they have to work? Standard answers include altruism or the “sticks” wielded by parents and employers. This article argues that there were also “carrots”: working gave children greater influence in household decision making. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost of Living Survey 1917–1919, this article shows that working children had higher clothing expenditures than did nonworking children and that clothing expenditures were increasing in the income a child brought into the household.

Substantial regional differentials in mortgage rates persisted throughout the postbellum period. I find that these differentials reflected not only variations in lending risk, but also the costs incurred in transferring funds between markets and unexplained regional premia. The results are consistent with the traditional interpretation that capital markets were at least partially segmented throughout the late nineteenth century. The effects on home and farm mortgage rates in the South and West were substantial and suggest that market segmentation could have had a substantial impact on the regional pattern of urbanization as well as agricultural development.

Early North American railways chose different track gauges partly on the basis of differing engineering traditions and partly for mutual compatibility. The resulting dynamic process produced nine district common-guage regions by the 1860s. Growing demand for interregional traffic and increasing among railways yielded incentives to resolve this diversity, and the specific regional pattern of gauges led to selection pf 4'8.5” as the continental standard. The case offers support for aspects of differing views on the role of path dependence in determining features of the economy.

This article reconsiders industrial growth in post-Unification Italy in light of a new set of sector-specific production estimates. Though still in part provisional, the new series confirm that the production of durables (and related materials) was dominated by the Kuznets cycle. A similar cycle is documented in the growth rate of the residual, excluding foodstuffs, and extended by reasonable assumption to foodstuffs as well. The new series thus support the traditional view of the 1880s as a period of widespread prosperity and above-trend consumption rather than the opposite, now dominant view.This article presents the first comprehensive results of a long-term research project that owes much to the constant encouragement of Pierluigi Ciocca and Gianni Toniolo, to extended exchanges with Giovanni Federico, to the kindness of the librarians at the Bank of Italy and the Istituto centrale di statistica, and not least, for their financial support, to the Ente per gli studi monetari, bancari e finanziari “Luigi Einaudi,” the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica. The usual disclaimer applies.

The records of the United States Army, which hired civilian workers in the nineteenth century, have produced a large sample of wage rates. New estimates of nominal daily wage rates from 1820 to 1856 are presented. There is no evidence of a long-term increase in the skill differential. The growth of real wages in the Northeast appears to have been slower and more erratic than previously thought. Regional trends in wages are consistent with other evidence on patterns of regional growth and internal migration.

Available evidence on interest rates and government borrowing during Britain's industrial revolution, while limited, does not support the idea that war spending crowded out private investment. This article demonstrates the importance of using data on net receipts from borrowing, rather than changes in government debt. Weaknesses of the crowding-out model concerning capital markets and investment, openness of the economy, and full employment are identified for the historical case. The case raises broader issues of whether conceptions of saving and investment based in neoclassical supply-constrained models are as appropriate as theories of capital accumulation.

Before the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933, several states established deposit guarantee funds. The key factor influencing the adoption of deposit insurance by a state was the structure of its banking industry. In states where small unit banks were dominant, there was strong support for guarantee funds to protect deposits; in other states there was more interest in branch banking. The failure to design the guarantee funds in accordance with sound principles of insurance brought about their demise and led to increased branch banking.

What happened to the standard of life of the British working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries ? Was the introduction of the factory system beneficial or harmful in its effect on the workers? These, though related, are distinct questions. For it is possible that employment in factories conduced to an increase of real wages but that the tendency was more than offset by other influences, such as the rapid increase of population, the immigration of Irishmen, the destruction of wealth by long years of warfare, ill-devised tariffs, and misconceived measures for the relief of distress. Both questions have a bearing on some political and economic disputes of our own day, and this makes it difficult to consider them with complete objectivity. An American scholar (so it is said) once produced a book entitled An Impartial History of the Civil War: From the Southern Point of View. If I seek to emulate his impartiality I ought also to strive to equal his candor. Let me confess, therefore, at the start that I am of those who believe that, all in all, conditions of labor were becoming better, at least after 1820, and that the spread of the factory played a not inconsiderable part in the improvement.

Between 1870 and 1930 production methods in American offices changed substantially as mechanical devices were introduced and work was subdivided and routinized. This paper explores connections between these technological advances and changes in clerical emplyment, particularly the employment of women in offices. A close correspondence is found between the timing of changes in the sex composition of clerical employment and the adoption of new techniques. It is argued that the new technology led to increased hiring of female clerical workers by reducing the form-specific skill requirements for clerical jobs.

The economic historian is well aware of the philanthropic origins of savings banks. Both in Western Europe and the United States they were initially established by public spirited individuals as a depository for the funds of small savers. It is not so widely appreciated that such banks were encouraged officially as a part of social policy in England during the nineteenth century. In an age in which self-help and individual thrift were conceived as the only solutions for lower-class poverty and distress, a means of spreading such virtues was sure not to go unnoticed. Brought forward in those critical years at the end of the Napoleonic wars, “here was the first constructive and practical proposal for counteracting the growing pauperization of the community, restoring independence to the masses, stopping the growth of the poor rate, and giving the ordinary man and woman some interest in the financial stability of the country.”

With more than 30 million people moving to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), governments feared that Europe was losing its most talented workers. Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than their literate and skilled counterparts. Emigration rates were highest in poorer farming communities with stronger migrant networks. I constructed these data using new name-based techniques to follow people over time and to measure chain migration from origin communities to the United States.