I analyzed the market of paintings in Florence and Italy (1285–1550). Hedonic regressions on real prices allowed me to advance evidence that the market was competitive and that an important determinant of artistic innovation was driven by economic incentives. Price differentials reflected quality differentials between painters as perceived at the time (whose proxy is the length of the biography of Vasari) and did not depend on regional destinations, as expected under monopolistic competition with free entry. An inverse-U relation between prices and age of execution is consistent with reputational theories of artistic effort, and prices increased since the 1420s.

After World War II Brazil experienced exceptionally high economic growth, ranking tenth among the largest economies by 1960. Yet evidence shows that real wages lagged far behind productivity, especially from 1956, the heyday of “developmentalism”—an economic ideology aimed at state-led, accelerated industrialization, with foreign and domestic private capital as active partners. The outcome diverged from that of the “social compact for growth,” the cornerstone of the “golden age” in Europe and Japan. A key reason was that in Brazil left-wingers controlled the main trade unions and pushed an agenda of social reform that was widely rejected by industrialists.

Alexander Hamilton's “Report on Manufactures” (1791) is a classic document of U.S. economic policy, but its fate in Congress is not well known. It is commonly believed that the report was never implemented. Although Hamilton's proposals for bounties (subsidies) failed to receive support, virtually every tariff recommendation was adopted by Congress in early 1792. These tariffs were not highly protectionist because Hamilton feared discouraging imports, which were the critical tax base on which he planned to fund the public debt. As a consequence, protectionist interests shifted their political support from the Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans during the 1790s.

Labor costs historically have been decisive in determining the location of cotton textile production. Despite an apparent advantage in wage rates, however, the southern industry did not achieve sustained relative progress before about 1875. This study argues that in most times and places the region did not have “cheap labor” before this date. What matters is not just the level of wages in any year, but the quality of labor attracted at this wage and the geographic scope of the labor market within which firms operate. The scope of the labor market depends in turn on property rights and incentives toward recruitment activity.

Decreases in the racial schooling gap have been shown to account for one-third of the increase in the black-white income ratio from 1930 to 1970. But the usual measure of the gap, based on census educational attainment data, is flawed. Data on school enrollment rates and months of school attended reveal that schooling levels of blacks born in the late nineteeth century were far lower than census data indicate. With the corrections proposed, the narrowing of the racial schooling gap explains two-thirds of the rise in the black-white income ratio from 1930 to 1970.

The export crisis of the early 1620's, the causes of which formed the subject of an earlier paper, was without doubt one of the most widely discussed topics of the day. It figured largely in the Parliamentary debates of 1621 and 1624; it gave rise to much official inquiry and unofficial documentary discussion; and it produced a number of books which, though published as frank livres de circonstance, have come down to us as representative of the economic views of the period in general. A careful reconsideration of these works in the light of the immediate circumstances that prompted diem would help t o explain die peculiarity of some of the arguments put forward, and would be a valuable essay on die origins of Mercantilist concepts. The aim of the present paper is to select two particular topics which illustrate how close the connection was between die discussion of immediate issues and what passes for more abstract Mercantilist “theory.”

Agricultural distress in the 1920s is routinely quoted among the causes of the Great Depression. This article challenges the conventional wisdom. World agriculture was not plagued by overproduction and falling terms of trade. The indebtedness of American farmers, a legacy of the boom years 1918–1921, did jeopardize the rural banks, but the relation between their crises, the banking panic of 1930, and the Great Depression is tenuous at best.

The Near East underwent a process of integration with the global economy during the second half of the nineteenth century. This article explores one aspect of this process, examining the linkages established between the cotton industries in Egypt and Western Anatolia, and the international cotton market during the first wave of globalization. We undertake a quantitative exploration of the pattern of price transmission between the Near East and the international cotton markets over this period, connecting changes in the nature of spatial market integration to major economic and political developments.

We provide evidence that the problem of raising capital in the early days of the U.S. electric-utility industry motivated industry leaders to embrace state rate-of-return regulation in return for a secure territorial monopoly. Utility executives anticipated that this would lead to a reduction in borrowing costs. Using firm-level bond data for 1910–1919, we estimate a model and find that state regulation led to lower borrowing costs but that the magnitude of the reduction was small. We also find evidence that output of electric utilities in states with regulation was higher than output in states without regulation.

This article combines uniquely detailed household-level tax assessments with reconstituted family histories for an eighteenth-century agricultural village near Paris. The tax records reveal substantial diversity in income among taxpayers despite the exemptions given privileged landowners. High-income households had significantly lower levels of infant and adult mortality, earlier age at marriage of the wife, and slightly lower rates of emigration by their surviving children. Marital fertility was high at all income levels. These classic Malthusian patterns were found at the household level more than a generation after the last great subsistence crises and resulted in a much higher local rate of replacement for the better-off families.

Over a century ago the American economist Henry C. Carey wrote that the masters of slaves “feel that they consult their own interests in feeding, clothing, and lodging them well, because wealth increases faster than population, and their labor becomes daily more valuable.” The change in the wealth/labor ratio which Carey noted is a fundamental aspect of economic growth. Carey saw its consequences in terms of the better care bestowed upon the slave by his master, but with appropriate modifications the same consequences apply to the free worker in a maturing industrial society.

One might have supposed that historians, largely occupied as they have been with the activities of ruling classes, would have been among the first to study systematically the problem of the recruitment and tenure of elites. This problem is an especially interesting one in a country such as the United States which has had no official caste systems and no legally established hereditary hierarchies. Yet most American historians have shied away from it. Few of them have even raised questions about the locus and transmission of power or status in modern times. Moreover, those who have discussed in particular the ascent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century business leaders have tended to attribute their success simply to the possession of more shrewdness or trickiness or more pluck or luck or other private qualities than competitors who failed to rise; the very few historians who have considered social determinants such as family background or work experience have, by stressing the alleged values of poverty or of starting business in boyhood, placed their emphasis, as we shall see, quite at the opposite pole from where it belongs.

I Do not much hold with ardent debate about method. A historian method is as individual—as private—a matter as a novelist's style. There is good reason for reserve—even reticence—on this subject, except insofar as we seek to share each other's unique professional adventures and to listen occasionally, in a mood of interest tempered with skepticism, to such general reflections as we each would draw from those adventures.

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830–1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

I decompose the market value of Colonial New Jersey's paper money into its component parts, namely its real-asset present value and transaction premium. Its market value was predominately determined by its real-asset present value. I also find a small transaction premium that is positively associated with the quantity of paper money in circulation and with the land-bank method of paper money injection. This paper money was not a fiat currency. It traded below face value due to time-discounting not depreciation.

In this study we show that French foreign investment from the end of the nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War was driven by economic and financial considerations. This refutes the hitherto accepted thesis that French capital exports were motivated by diplomatic and political factors. By using economic modeling that combines microeconomic and econometric approaches, we show that the geographic distribution of French financial flows was consistent with rational economic behavior.

The causes of the United States’ exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. American industrialization in the nineteenth century required tariff protection since the country's comparative advantage lay in agriculture. After 1895 surging American productivity shifted the country's comparative advantage to manufacturing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the United States would not have paid in their circumstances.

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 and 25 percent of estates. We use regression analysis to identify the time trend of wealth inequality and determine how warfare, significant weather events, macroeconomic variables, and shifts in population characteristics affected it.