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.

The re-emergence of AT&T as the dominant firm in the telephone industry resulted from its adopting a predatory response to entrants. AT&T's strategy was effective because government regulations and capital market imperfections provided the incumbent with a first-mover advantage that prevented challengers from entering simultaneously in all markets.

Over the 1919–1929 period, fluctuations in the value of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange exercised statistically significant and economically important impacts on the demand to hold cash balances. The marked post–1925 rise in the volume and value of stock trading led to a measurable increase in the transactions demand to hold cash balances, an increase in demand not recognized or seriously discussed by individuals inside or outside of the system. Had it been recognized, it is unlikely that the Fed would have persisted in its antispeculative policies in 1928–1929, policies associated with rises in interest rates and the beginnings of a downturn in real activity in the second quarter of 1929.

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.

World War II temporarily halted the rise in high school and college graduation rates. This article shows that manpower mobilization for World War II decreased educational attainment among high school-age females during the early 1940s, reduced employment and earnings, and altered decisions regarding family formation. I then provide evidence that women in this cohort returned to school in later life and relate these findings to the “quiet revolution” taking place as women learned about the benefits of school and work over the second half of the twentieth century.

“Education has been ever in the nation's service. But in these days of total war that service has a new significance. ‘You're in the Army now’ is no cliché–it is an expression of national necessity.”1

How—and how well—do food markets function in famine conditions? The controversy surrounding this question may benefit from historical perspective. Here we study two massive famines that struck France between 1693 and 1710, killing over two million people. In both cases the impact of harvest failure was exacerbated by wartime demands on the food supply; we ask whether the crises were exacerbated yet further by a failure of markets to function as they did in normal times. The evidence, we conclude, is most consistent with the view that markets in fact helped alleviate these crises, albeit modestly.

Aujourd'hui ces matières paraissent d'une telle aridité qu'elles provoquent le vide, même au sein du parlement, si par hasard on les y discute…On ne voit plus des écarts de prix comparables à ceux des grandes années de famine de la fin du règne de Louis XIV: 1693 et 1709.Germain Martin (French historian) in 1908[Today these issues seem so stupifyingly dull that they produce an empty house, even in parliament, if by chance they are discussed there…. One no longer sees gaps in prices comparable to those of the years of famine at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1693 and 1709.] Martin, “Famines,” p. 150.

I use retrospective work histories from a unique dataset to follow workers in six cities through occupational, industrial, and geographic moves, thereby characterizing aspects of black economic mobility during the 1940s that cannot be viewed through the Census data. Relatively few migrants were drawn directly from the southern agricultural sector. Black occupational upgrades were larger than white upgrades on average but black upgrades were smaller than those of observationally similar whites.

We present a new estimate of Anglo-German manufacturing productivity levels for 1935/36. It is based on archival data on German manufacturing and published British census data. We calculate comparative levels of value added, correcting for differences in prices for outputs and inputs. This so-called double deflation procedure provides new insights into productivity comparisons because output- and input price structures differed greatly between the two countries. Although the new calculations confirm existing results at an aggregate level, they reveal important differences at the industry level and show how Germany was striving for autarky as it prepared its economy for war.

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

Since its publication in 1974, Andrew Watson's article “The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700–1100,” has been used and cited widely by historians and archaeologists, many working in fields far removed from Watson's. This essay explores the nature of Watson's impact and attempts to explain it.

This article presents the first agricultural production function for the eighteenth century, thereby quantifying the effect of many new technologies coming on stream in English agriculture. It shows that some traditional technologies were effective in raising wheat yields, such as drainage and marling; but some innovations of the eighteenth century were much more effective, particularly turnips and seed drills. Environmental factors are incorporated into the model. Climate is shown to be a crucial factor in determining yields but soil quality was much less important. This undermines the accepted argument that England's success was due to a superior natural endowment.

We examine the role of irrigation in explaining U.S. agricultural gains post-1940. Specifically, we analyze how productivity and farm values changed in the western United States as a result of technological and policy changes that expanded access to ground and surface water. To statistically identify the effects, we compare counties based on their potential access to irrigation water defined by physical characteristics. We find areas with access to large streams and/or groundwater increase crop production relative to areas with only small streams by $19 billion annually, equivalent to 90 percent of the total annual increase in the western United States after 1940.

In 1940, when our Association was founded, this paper might have borne the same title as Caroline Ware's book: The Cultural Approach to History. In the meantime, however, world events have brought economists and historians together around the problem of economic growth. So, while pursuing the same interests illustrated in my contribution to Caroline Ware's book, I have chosen the more fashionable title of “Cultural Factors in Economic Growth.”

This article combines a game-theoretic framework and a comparative analysis to study the impact of the Great Depression on private welfare capitalism. Recharacterizing welfare capitalism as an implicit-contract equilibrium, the article documents parallel institutional developments in the United States and Japan in the 1920s and the process of bifurcation thereafter. In the United States, the breach of contract by major employers induced by the depression led to the rise of explicit contracts and legal enforcement institutions. By contrast, the less severe depression in Japan allowed the maintenance of implicit contracts and the formation of complementary labor laws.This article is partly based on my doctoral dissertation. I am deeply indebted to my thesis advisors, Avner Greif, Gavin Wright, Masahiko Aoki, and John Pencavel. I am grateful to Lee Alston, Carliss Baldwin, Samuel Bowles, Adam Brandenburger, Loren Brandt, Amit Bubna, Louis Cain, David Fairris, Joe Ferrie, Price Fishback, Robert Gibbons, Claudia Goldin, Rakesh Kurana, Robert Margo, Jim Minifie, Joel Mokyr, Laura Owen, Ben Polak, Daniel Raff, Paul Rhode, William Tsutsui, Warren Whatley, and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Explanations for the recent decline in the labor force attachment of males 65 years of age and older include the introduction of Old Age and Survivors Insurance and the growth in private pension programs. Neither hypothesis can explain the sizable decline that occurred between 1930 and 1950, when aggregate social security and private pension payments were small. Estimates from pooled state aggregate data indicate that the means-tested Old Age Assistance program established by the Social Security Act of 1935 significantly increased retirement activity in this period, particularly among low-income individuals.

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 Prussia was an industrial backwater. By the mid 1860's Prussia had achieved a considerable degree of industrialization. In a sense, her economy had “taken off.” The turning point dates from around 1840 and was closely related to railroad building. Before 1840 industrial investment grew haltingly. The combination of inadequate markets and the lack of supporting enterprise made industrial investment—particularly in those lines in which Europe's industrial leader, England, was already specialized—too risky and/or its anticipated yields too low for most potential investors, who preferred to invest in real estate, commerce, and in foreign government bonds. As leading Prussian entrepreneurs argued, the country's industrial development required public investment in river improvements, roads, canals, railroads, banks, and other facilities which would generate external economies and make private investment, for example in metalworking enterprise, more profitable. Theoretically, such public investment could have been financed by curtailing other governmental expenditures, by taxing unproductive consumption, and/or by borrowing. The technical proficiency required by such investments was either domestically available or could be readily borrowed from abroad. Even Prussian political economy, through its interpretation of the Classicists, reflected these conditions and called for state assistance. The will, the means, and a rationale for a program of public investment were at hand: one could truly speak of an abundance of “advantages of backwardness” in Prussia after 1815.

There are currently two ways of estimating relative levels of per capita income back to the nineteenth century. The most commonly adopted approach, popularized in particular by Angus Maddison and labeled “long-span” estimates by Marianne Ward and John Devereux, is to use time-series projection from a recent benchmark.Maddison, Monitoring; and Ward and Devereux, “Measuring British Decline.” The alternative procedure, labeled “direct estimates” by Ward and Devereux, is to use direct benchmark estimates for earlier years. Ward and Devereux provide some new “direct estimates” which they claim over-turn the conventional chronology of U.K./U.S. relative per capita income levels for the period 1870–1990, derived using “long-span” projections. One important purpose of this note is to dispute the new estimates, and hence to reassert the conventional chronology. Along the way, however, I wish also to make a more general methodological point about the use of time series projections and direct benchmark estimates of relative per capita income levels. In my view, it is unsatisfactory for researchers to note a large discrepancy and simply claim the superiority of one type of evidence over the other. Rather, a satisfactory account of the evolution of relative per capita incomes over a long period should be able to encompass both sorts of evidence.I am grateful to Nick Crafts, Douglas Puffert, Mark Harrison, Douglas Irwin, Angus Maddison, and Mary O'Mahony for comments on an earlier version and to Knick Harley for editorial advice. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.

We estimate a threshold autoregressive model to assess medieval financial integration. Our approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which in a fully integrated market should not exceed bullion points. Hence, the time needed for adjustment, following a violation of the bullion points, is a measure of integration. We apply this approach to exchange between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders, Lübeck, and Prussia, results showing that whereas it took about eight months to reduce deviations between Flanders and Lübeck by 50 percent, those between Flanders and Prussia were roughly twice as persistent.

The pendulum of scholarship has swung too far towards the position that the profits from slaving were small. Thomas and Bean in concept and Anstey and Richardson in practice have reckoned them too small. The detailed accounts of several dozen ventures in the late eighteenth century show that the trade was difficult to enter, dominated by a few large merchants, and subject to long runs of high “short-run” profits, as in 1779–1788: The best firms earned upwards of 50 percent on their investments, well above the normal profits of an easy trade.

This article uses evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses to investigate the correlates of the wealth of adult males in Chicago. The analysis reveals rapidly increasing wealth with age, a substantial positive effect on wealth of duration of residence in the city, and an absence of any significant impact of nativity on wealth when controlling occupation. Mean wealth rose from well below the national average in 1850 to a level far above the national average in 1860. Together these results suggest that early Chicago was a place of exceptional economic opportunity for settlers.