The external growth of a sample of large German enterprises for the 1880–1913 period is here investigated. External growth, defined as acquisition of existing firms and measured by the reported value of their assets, is found to have accounted for no more than one-fifth of average overall enterprise growth in the period. An examination of individual examples, however, reveals that external growth was frequently decisive for the growth of survivor enterprises and, in some sectors, a significant contributor to concentration. Some quantitative tests suggest that financial factors, and particularly stock prices, significantly influenced external growth. The paper concludes by comparing German with British and American findings.

There are times when researchers must struggle through the weeds and pass up the easier roads chosen by Crane's wayfarer. Such a time has come for research on the growth and structure of the English economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. Our rational preference for the easier roads has caused us to apply increasing amounts of our abundant analytical cleverness to an endowment of empirical raw materials that has grown relatively slowly. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to historical research as well as to other activities, and the relatively generous inputs of analysis have lowered their marginal returns and created a condition of raw material scarcity. The returns to hacking through the archival weeds for new raw materials now seem high.

We use a novel data set spanning 1820–1910 to assess the factors leading to the creation of formal bank supervisory institutions across American states. We show that it took more than a century for all states to create separate agencies tasked with monitoring the safety and soundness of banks. State legislatures initially pursued cheaper regulatory alternatives, such as double liability laws; however, banking distress at the state level as well as the structural shift from note-issuing to deposit-taking commercial banks and competition with national banks propelled policymakers to adopt costly and permanent supervisory institutions.

This article evaluates criticisms by Sarah G. Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Tine De Moor of our view of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), and explains why their claims are incorrect. We elaborate our arguments concerning the institutional sources of economic growth, explore the relationship between women's position and the EMP, analyze the two-way links between demographic and economic behavior, and explicate aspects of our empirical analysis that these scholars find puzzling. The causes of European economic growth, we reiterate, are not to be found in the EMP but rather must be sought in the wider framework of nonfamilial institutions.

Average annual earnings calculated from the census of manufactures are used to extend previous research on labor market integration in the United States. In contrast to earlier research examining occupational wage rates, census average earnings indicate that a well-integrated labor market had emerged in the Northeast and North Central regions as early as 1879. They also reveal substantial convergence within the South Atlantic and South Central regions, suggesting the emergence of a unified southern labor market. Large and persistent North-South differentials indicate, however, that a unified national labor market did not develop before World War I.

As evidence has accumulated on the prosperity of the American South under slavery prior to the Civil War, attention has turned to a search for explanations for the apparent stagnation of the southern economy after the Civil War. One class of explanations involves the argument that the South experienced special difficulties in recovering her place in the international cotton market during the late 1860's and 1870's. In one version of this hypothesis, the presence of “new” sources of supply, stimulated by the cotton famine of 1861–65, acted to displace American cotton in world markets during this period. A second version, recently proposed by Mark Aldrich, argues that appreciation of the dollar resulting from capital imports and northern economic expansion forced American cotton to compete with the rest of the world on unfavorable terms prior to the resumption of specie payments in 1879.

Population pressure has been identified as a major force behind the transition from traditional property rights in land to exclusive, transferable property rights. This article examines the case of Hawaii where the transition to private property in land occurred while its population was rapidly declining. That transition was driven by new market opportunities and considerations of public finance.The shift in comparative advantage to sugar production increased the rents associated with private land rights, while declining tax revenues prompted the king and his government to pursue property rights reform to gain additional revenues.

The poor performance of the Colombian economy in the world markets during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are attributable, in part, to the weakness of settlers’ property rights in frontier lands. To examine this issue, we collected data on production of agricultural exports at county (municipal) level in 1892, coffee production in 1925, and of public land allocation and land conflicts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The quantitative analysis suggests that in the absence of land conflicts, the per capita production of agricultural exports would have been in 1925 at least twice as much as that observed.

We examine the dynamic relationships between relief spending and local private labor markets using a panel data set of relief, private employment, and private earnings. Positive shocks to relief during the First New Deal were followed by increased private employment and earnings, consistent with demand stimulus in that period. On the other hand, increases in work relief spending during the Second New Deal were followed by decreased employment and increased earnings, consistent with crowding out. The timing of spending is consistent with claims that the Roosevelt administration used relief spending to sway elections.

Since 1925 a number of scholars have conducted studies of the general business elite in America. Their studies have concluded that the American business elite has been predominantly native born, urban, better educated than the general population, and has originated disproportionately from higher economic classes. These conclusions are not surprising. It might have been surprising if the business elite were found to have emerged predominantly from the poor and less educated, and the immigrant, farm or working-class populations. Such origins would infer a rapid displacement of elite members, the possibility of rapid and massive disaggregation of family fortunes, and the loss of family aggrandizement as a motivating consideration in the minds of aspiring businessmen. This, however, was apparently not the case.

This article expands upon the current “resource curse” literature by using newly collected county data, spanning over a century, to capture the short- and long-run effects of coal mining activity. It provides evidence that increased levels of coal production had positive net impacts on county-level population and manufacturing activity over an initial ten-year span, which become negative over the subsequent decades. The results provide evidence that any existence of a “resource curse” on local areas due to coal mining is a long-run phenomenon, and in the short run there are potential net benefits.

This article explores differences between the cotton industries in England and America in the early nineteenth century. I show that the two countries produced almost entirely different products: the Enlish made fine fabrics; the Americans, coarse. The cause of this disjunction is found in the American tariff policy, whichwas influenced by the Massachusetts cotton manufacturers. Since coarse spinning promoted vertical integration, the American product structure favored integration. This argument reveals that the variables analyzed were jointly determined, since the Massachusetts firms with the political clout to affect the tariff were vertically integrated.

There is at present no series of crop yields available for early modern England. This paper describes a method for calculating estimates of grain yields in bushels per acre using data derived from English probate inventories. Results are presented of 10-year average yields for wheat, rye, barley, oats, and peas for the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk during 1587–98, 1628–40, and 1660–1735. These results are compared with other yield figures for the periods before and after these dates, and used to revise existing estimates of the progress of productivity changes.

Most explanations of trends in women's work emphasize women's role in childbearing, along with technological and organizational changes in production. The explanations neglect an important factor: the need to control sexuality in order to secure demographic order. Segregated employment enabled almost all family members to work, while discouraging heterosexual intimacy. Nineteenth-century attitudes illustrate the anxiety felt when unrelated men and women worked together. The argument is tested by correlating regional variation in illegitimacy, as a measure of failed social control, with variation in sex segregation.

The greater flexibility associated with workers being able to choose the time and circumstance of their work allowed cottage manufacture to compete with technically more productive manufactories by rendering it more effective at harnessing a part time or offpeak workforce whose opportunity cost was low. Not only did this mean that cottage manufacture was better suited to the employment of women and children, who preferred flexibility in their hours and place of work, but also that the greater seasonality of labor supply in England led that economy to rely more on cottage manufacturing than did the United States during early industrialization.

In the late nineteenth century, when most of the world was on a gold standard, India was on a silver standard. Silver was used for coins, held in hoards, and worn as jewelry. Regression analysis confirms a positive relationship between prices and the money supply, and inverse relationships between prices and rainfall and prices and the combined influences of railroads and commercialization. The. influx of silver was not correlated with the money supply, apparently because hoarding and dishoarding by peasants and others caused the amount of money in active circulation to vary.

Socioeconomic differences in birth weight have narrowed since 1900. The mother's nutritional status during her growing years, proxied by height, accounted for most of the differences in the past, but not today. Children born at the beginning of this century compared favorably to modem populations in terms of birth weights, but suffered high fetal and neonatal death rates. By day ten children in the past were at a disadvantage because best practice resulted in insufficient feeding. Improved obstetrical, medical, and nutritional knowledge has increased weight in the first days of life, which may account for increased adult stature.

After adjusting for sample-selection bias, I find a net decline in average stature of 0.64 inches in the birth cohorts of 1832–1860 in the United States. This result supports the veracity of the Antebellum Puzzle—a deterioration of health during early modern economic growth in the United States. However, this adjustment alters the trend in average stature in the same cohort range, validating concerns over bias in the historical heights literature. The adjustment is based on census-linked military height data and uses a two-step semi-parametric sample-selection model to adjust for selection on observables and unobservables.

By-Employments, one may suppose, tend to ready preindustrial people for modern economic roles since they represent an incipient shift from agriculture to other occupations, spread skills useful to industrialization among the most backward and numerous part of the population, and stimulate ambition and geographical mobility. Although widespread in Western preindustrial societies, by-employments have been mainly treated there from the standpoint of the history of industry to the neglect of their effect on the habits, aptitudes, and outlook of fanners and their wives and children. This is partly due to the scattered and widely varied and changing forms of by-employments, which make it all but impossible to know what proportion of farmers practiced them and what part of their income they earned in this way.

Gold discoveries in 1848 set off a large and extremely rapid migration to California. This article uses newly collected data from the 1850 and 1852 Censuses of Population together with the public use sample of the 1850 Census of Population to examine who went to California and how they did economically. We find that the propensity to migrate was affected by the individual's age and literacy, distance of the state from California, and average state latitude. Consistent with the historical literature, we find that economic outcomes were generally small or even zero for miners but were positive and large for nonminers.