Little is known about the distribution of wealth in the allegedly egalitarian society of the rural North on the eve of the Civil War. This paper investigates the role of the age structure of the heads of household and a life-cycle pattern of accumulation in determining the wealth distribution within that society and among the various groups that comprised it. The results suggest a need for caution in making cross-group or inter-temporal comparisons in wealth distributions without taking account of such factors.

The impact of the Great Depression was milder in the South Atlantic states, more severe in the Mountain states, and surprisingly uniform across other regions of the countly—despite large differences in industrial structere. Employing data on 20 manufacturing industries disaggregated by state, we analyze the relative contributions of industry mix and location to regional variations in economic performance. Industrial composition had a significant impact on employment growth, with regions that concentrated on durable goods or inputs to construction faring worse than others. Long-run trends also mattered, and explain much of the South Atlantic's more favorable performance.

Advertisements from antebellum New York City newspapers are used to estimate hedonic indices of the rental price of housing. Rents varied with the quality of housing and its location, suggesting a well-defined market for rental housing. Controlling for housing characteristics and location, the relative price of housing rose between 1830 and 1860.

The 1933 Ukrainian famine killed as many as 2.6 million people out of a population of 32 million. Historians offer three main explanations: weather, economic policies, genocide. This paper documents that (1) available data do not support weather as the main explanation: 1931 and 1932 weather predicts harvest roughly equal to the 1924–1929 average; weather explains up to 8.1 percent of excess deaths. (2) Policies (collectivization of agriculture and the lack of favored industries) significantly increased famine mortality; collectivization explains up to 52 percent of excess deaths. (3) There is some evidence that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.

In the interwar period, Japanese textile firms were able to greatly increase labor efficiency and become the world's main exporter of cotton textiles. Meanwhile, the Indian industry stagnated and was forced to retreat behind tariff walls. This paper argues that the flexibility of the Japanese work force stemmed from its high turnover; the Indian laborers were collectively inflexible in defending lifetime careers against technical changes that reduced labor demand. As the industry requires only a few easily acquired skills, a committed work force was actually a disadvantage to Indian management.

This article investigates the characteristics of early settlers on the midwestern farming frontier, the correlates of their geographic mobility, and the determinants of their wealth. Using evidence drawn from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 federal censuses we find average rates of growth of wealth over time that were considerably above the national average, a steeper cross-sectional relationship between wealth and age than those found for contemporary national samples, and a substantial positive effect of early arrival on the frontier on wealth levels. Very high levels of economic opportunity may have been a characteristic of the farming frontier.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets.

The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital—savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control.

Soon after establishing political control, the British colonial administration in southern Nigeria attempted to replace the existing currencies of the country with British currency. The traditional currencies competently discharged the functions of money, however, and it required fifty years before the pre-colonial currencies, attacked by the colonial authorities and unrecognized as legal tender, gradually lost standing and proved worthless to their last holders. Theoretical implications of these developments are discussed.

The received view pins the adoption of labor regulation before 1914 on domestic forces. Using directed dyad-year event history analysis, we find that trade was also a pathway of diffusion. Market access served as an important instrument to encourage the diffusion of labor regulation. The type of trade mattered as much as the volume. In the European core, states emulated the labor regulation of partners because intra-industry trade was important. The New World exported less differentiated products and pressures to imitate were weak.

We examine U.S. agricultural policy as an institutional choice. Price controls in World War I had demonstrated the government's influence in markets, and with falling crop prices in the 1920s, farmers appealed to the federal government. The federal government was large enough by then to intervene in variou ways. It could have assisted private cooperatives by providing antitrust exemptions, market information, and enforcement of cooperative rules or intervened directly with mandatory output reductions and targeted prices. The policies adopted were influenced by crop-specific characteristics and broader market conditions affecting the success of private cooperatives.

We estimate the monthly and hourly earnings ratio between agricultural and manufacturing laborers, adjusting for compensation received in-kind and differences in the cost of living. Our results indicate that prior to the Great Depression, agricultural compensation was similar to that in manufacturing within geographic regions, and a substantial earnings gap in favor of manufacturing emerged in the early thirties.

Managerial firms and cartels were central components of the German economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Based on stochastic frontier regressions, we show for a sample of coal mining corporations and the period 1881–1913 that cartelization did not affect productive efficiency. Bonuses paid to board members, however, did increase the efficiency of coal mining firms. Thus, one pillar of the German economic model did not negatively affect economic efficiency, whereas another pillar had a positive impact. Furthermore, our results suggest that coal was mined with slightly decreasing returns to scale.

British shipbuilding enjoyed undisputed international supremacy between 1890 and 1914. Following a gradual loss of world market share during the interwar years, Britain sustained an absolute decline in output between 1948 and 1970. European shipbuilding expanded at an unprecedented rate after World War II. This article attributes Britain's dramatic competitive decline in part to management's uncertaintly about the need to reform work administration methods during the decade or so following world War II, and in part to lack of trust between labor and management, which resulted in a failure of cooperation over proposed institutional reform between 1958 and 1965.

This paper illuminates one particular aspect of the theme of this session, property rights in man. It will deal with various emancipation plans: those actually enacted in various slave societies; those discussed by legislators who debated slave and antislave proposals; and those which, being purely fictional, have become part of counterfactual history.

In his recently published volume on American economic history, Chester W. Wright says, in substance, that whereas he can give some account of the vicissitudes experienced by the several distributive factors of land, labor, and capital, he will have to deal in a very cursory fashion with the entrepreneur and with entrepreneurial gains since so little is known about them. I, for one, welcomed this statement of so eminent a student of American economic history since it gave such forthright support to ideas which I was at the time presenting to the recently organized Committee on Research in Economic History (ideas by no means wholly or even chiefly my own) relative to the desirability of research in the history of American entrepreneurship.

Research on nineteenth-century economic and social mobility has concentrated on occupational change among men who remained in the same community for ten or more years, although fewer than half of any community's residents persist that long. This article uses a data set created specifically to compare the experiences of men who migrated from Newburyport, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century with those of men who persisted. It finds that blue-collar migrants were more successful than were their counterparts who did not move. The results suggest that previous studies may have considerably underestimated the extent of economic opportunity in nineteenth-century America.

Wealth and asset holding in late-nineteenth-century Ontario are examined using a new data set of census-linked probated decedents. Hump-shaped wealth-age profiles are found, supporting the importance of demographic and life cycle forces in late-nineteenth-century financial asset accumulation. With financial asset holding more pronounced in Ontario than Quebec, the implication for Canadian economic development is that the differences in capital formation and industrialization across Ontario and Quebec are partly rooted in saving behavior. The results show that urbanization, occupational status, literacy, the number of children, and region of residence are important determinants of wealth and asset holding.

The writing and allocation of French tax farm contracts changed dramatically after the Fronde (1648–1653): they were gradually transformed from small, competitively auctioned, units into a large cartel known as the Company of General Farms. Surprisingly, the crown's revenues increased. I present a transaction cost argument to explain the behavior of tax farm lease prices as tax farming changed during the seventeenth century. Cartelization of tax farms lowered costs faced by the crown. The tax farm system's evolution offers insights into how organizations evolve to protect their property rights in the absence of well functioning representative institutions.

How much of the increased consumption of machine-made cotton yarn and cloth in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China represented a net increase in the total consumption of cotton goods? What part of the increment merely denoted a shift of the source of supply from rural handicraft to factory production—in Shanghai and Tientsin and, in the form of imports, in overseas mills? These questions, of course, are only part of the more inclusive problem of the effects of expanding foreign trade and the beginnings of domestic industrialization upon the agricultural sector in modern China. The most important household handicraft in rural China was, however, the spinning and weaving of cotton. An examination of its fate, while it will not dispose entirely of the larger problem, is a critical step toward that end.