This study focuses primarily on the movements of people and capital between a number of selected European and overseas countries during a phase of mass migration. The data indicate that the international movements of people, capital, and goods were extremely fluid, were adaptable, and took place under highly diverse conditions of population change and economic growth. A number of uniformities emerge, including for example a close relationship between international borrowing, high growth rates, and large flows of immigrants. These and a variety of other general patterns are examined as aspects of the massive demographic shifts of this period.

The Reciprocity Treaty between the British North American Provinces (Canada) and the United States was ratified in February 1855 and terminated in March 1866. It provided for free trade in all natural products, free access for United States fisheries to the Atlantic coastal waters of British North America, and access to the St. Lawrence River for American vessels under the same tolls as native vessels.

We investigate determinants of slave family discounts in the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families unrelated to scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. We posit that because family members voluntarily cared for each other, sellers sometimes found it advantageous to keep families together (when families included needy or dependent members). Evidence from ship manifests carrying slaves for sale in New Orleans provides direct evidence for selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts. Children likely to have been shipped with their mothers are 1 to 2 inches shorter than other children.

Using a novel data set on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed raiding of commercial vessels was a popular and flourishing business among merchants that took a serious toll on enemy trade from 1689 to 1815. Why, then, did privateering merchants gradually turn away from these profitable endeavors? We show that the expansion of overseas trade increased the opportunity costs for merchants and resulted in the decline of privateering. Our findings document that the decline of privateering had as much to do with an expanding maritime economy as with the rising naval power of the British state.

Using recently collected examination data from a sample of Texas state-chartered banks over the period 1919–1926, the role of moral hazard in increasing ex-ante asset risk is explored. Analyzing individual bank-level data, we find that the existence of deposit insurance for state-chartered banks increased their likelihood of failure. Increases in loan concentrations followed declines in capitalization at insured state banks. However, we find no statistically significant relationship between loan concentrations and capitalization at uninsured national banks or at state banks before the introduction of deposit insurance. These results show a moral-hazard effect at work.

We provide the first estimates of immigrant residential segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan–Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small factory towns and for non-European sources. Early twentieth-century immigrants spatially assimilated at a slow rate, leaving immigrants’ lived experience distinct from natives for decades after arrival.

According to conventional income measures, American and British industrial workers in the late nineteenth century were two to four times as wealthy as those in developing countries today. Estimated calorie expenditure elasticities of American and British industrial workers based on the 1888 Cost of Living Survey are greater than calorie elasticity estimates for developing countries today, which suggest that yesterday's wealthy workers were hungrier than today's poor. The result is robust to numerous criticisms. The finding implies an extraordinary improvement in nutritional well-being among the poor in the last century that has not been captured by our income estimates.

Domestic slave traders selected taller slaves for shipment to the New Orleans market in order to increase their profits. Because traded slaves made up a large share of the slaves shipped coastwise, age/height profiles constructed from the shipping manifests are biased upwards. The extent of the bias appears to be small for adult slaves but not for children; those listed on the manifests were taller than the general population of a comparable age.

This paper documents a secular increase during the antebellum period in the fraction of New York's population that received public poor relief. The increase was concentrated among able-bodied adults who required only short-term assistance during periods of sickness or unemployment. Cross-sectional patterns suggest that the rise of market production and the spread of wage labor in both urban-industrial and rural-agricultural sectors, rather than urbanization or industrialization, may have been responsible for the upward trend in short-term, ablebodied pauperism.

Robert Fogel and Albert Fishlow have attempted in recent studies to measure the net contribution of the railroad to American economic growth in two specific years: 1890 and 1859. Both their methods and conclusions have confused, if not dismayed, more conventional historians. This article has two objectives: The first is to provide a simplified guide to the analytical framework underlying their calculations and the second is to suggest to both old and new economic historians that the measurements employed by Fogel and Fishlow bear no direct relationship to what they claim to measure—the benefits to the nineteenth-century economy from the existence of the railroad.

In 1587 the English Privy Council issued its first Book of Orders for the relief of dearth, a program of grain-market control that included forced delivery of private stocks to local markets in crisis periods. The policy has been described as an effective response to irrational hoarding and credited for a significant reduction in English grain-price variance. In contrast, I find support for an alternative profit maximizing model of storage. The occurrence of similar price stabilization in other European markets in the early seventeenth century is also demonstrated, suggesting English policy was not the cause.

The literature currently offers no consistent narrative about economic development on Europe's southeastern periphery prior to 1945. Did per capita GNP in the Balkans converge with the rest of Europe? We present new GNP estimates for Bulgaria for 1892–1911 and link these with a new degree of precision to the data available for the 1920s. Our data reveal stagnation in per capita GNP from 1879 to the 1930s. But within agriculture we find evidence for a new phase of intensification from the 1920s onwards. The preconditions for growth, sometimes attributed to Communism, were in place well before 1945.

Between 1890 and 2004 total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the United States has been strongly procyclical, while labor productivity growth has been mildly so. This article argues that these results are not simply a statistical artifact, as Mathew Shapiro and others have argued. Procyclicality resulted principally from demand shocks interacting with capital services which are relatively invariant over the cycle. This account contrasts with explanations emphasizing labor hoarding as well as those offered by the real business cycle (RBC) program, in which TFP shocks (deviations from trend) are themselves the cause of cycles.

In an effort to begin to solve the continuing controversy over how high the standard of living was in Japan prior to industrialization, this paper goes beyond the inadequate quantitative data and examines also qualitative and local evidence. Information on housing and food, urban water quality and waste disposal, and life styles is examined along with representative family budgets and two sets of real wage estimates. The evidence, taken together with life expectancy estimates, suggests that the standard of living in mid-nineteenth-century Japan was not only higher than in the 1700s, but relatively high in comparison to most of the industrializing West.

The TVA has been applauded for its anti-malaria programs in the Southeast during the 1930s and 1940s. However, the TVA developed their anti-malaria programs because they created lakes suitable for mosquito breeding. To estimate the relationship between the TVA and malaria, I construct a county-level panel data from the Southeast United States. I find that the net effect of the TVA was to increase malaria rates following its construction. Using statistical life value estimates, I find that the hidden malaria cost of the TVA offset 24 percent of the fiscal stimulus multiplier generated by the TVA.

Takahashi Korekiyo is remembered as a wise finance minister saving Japan from the Great Depression. The contribution of his policy measures however remains to be rigorously measured, with proper control of other forces also driving the recovery. Structural vector autoregression analysis of previously unexploited monthly data confirms the pivotal role of Takahashi's debt-financed fiscal expansion. Monetizing the public debts, the Bank of Japan maintained a neutral stance. The recovery was aided by exchange-rate shocks generated during the transition from the gold standard to the floating-exchange-rate regime and, to a smaller extent, by the world recovery.

Educational institutions and intergenerational mobility are closely related; access to schools is a major determinant of a child's future success. This article offers new insight into this relationship with a study of mobility at the beginning of the United States' expansion of public schools in the early twentieth century. A new intergenerational data set is used to establish high rates of income mobility at the start of the century and a negative relationship between school quality and mobility. Educational attainment estimates reveal that this was a product of high-income families being more responsive to improving schools than poor families.

Some English country banks were more like modern venture capital firms than modern banks in terms of legal and managerial structure, size and source of investment funding, size and nature of investments, and riskiness. This is exemplified by Praed & Co. of Truro, which was heavily engaged in financing the adoption of a risky new technology—Watt steam engines—by Cornish copper mines in the period 1775–1800. If some banks were proto–venture capital firms, rather than proto-banks, then their illiquid and relatively undiversified investment strategies are more reasonable and their bankruptcies more understandable: high-risk investments sometimes earn negative returns.

Although the American cotton textile industry was heavily protected, most commentators, following Frank Taussig's lead, have concluded that indigenous technological advance made large branches of the industry internationally competitive by the 1830s. The prices of equivalent fabrics in Britain and America in the late 1840s and 1850s challenge that conclusion. “Domestic” fabrics, in which American mills had supposedly become competitive, cost 20 percent more in America. Critical reexamination of other evidence—cost comparisons from the 1830s and American exports—supports the conclusion that an unprotected American industry could not have competed.

We use census data and information on large firms to generate descriptions of structural features of Western industry around 1906. We find that although the United States conforms to existing stereotypes, most other nations do not. German industry stands out as having the smallest plants and firms and the lowest concentration levels both in the aggregate and when grouped by industrial classifications. Equally startling, French levels of plant size and concentration are comparable to those of the United States. We speculate on the importance of these results for rethinking the traditional analysis of industrial development in the early twentieth century.