Enacted in 1922 and repealed in 1929, the Sheppard-Towner program gave federal matching money to states to provide public health education to mothers. We examine variation in state participation in the program, and find that the timing of women's suffrage had an important impact. However, we find that the effect of suffrage was short-lived and did not influence public health spending after the program's repeal. We also find no evidence of a “demonstration effect.” On average, the states that continued activities after Sheppard-Towner ended were those that had sizable public health budgets before the program had even begun.

Disagreement on the state of the economic health of the new nation has persisted since contemporary observers disputed over the changes wrought by the end of the War for Inpendence. In recent years, diagnosis has ranged from the gloomy picture of commercial depression painted by Curtis Nettels to the rather different evaluation of Merrill Jensen, who found the period “one of extraordinary economic growth.”

This article tests the hypothesis that price shocks in international commodity markets would by themselves have led to a fall in agricultural labor demand in rural Ireland in the absence of the Famine. This hypothesis has been used by revisionist historians to argue that the Famine was not a structural break between two distinct eras in Irish economic history. In refuting the hypothesis, this article joins a more recent cliometric tradition that has sought to restore the Famine to its rightful place as a major watershed in nineteenth-century Ireland.

This paper uses a taxation assessment to analyze the relations between taxable peasant wealth and regional marketing geography. The results show cashcropping patterns for different grains and livestock. The selectivity of market involvement poses broader questions concerning economic vulnerability at the household and community levels among the English peasantry, and strategies used to contain vulnerability.

In the 1730s and 1750s the English government proposed to refinance the redeemable debt by “lowering the interest rate.” In the ensuing coordination game among creditors, large investors like the Bank of England could block the policy change by demanding cash. Using 4 percent and 3 percent annuities prices to analyze market expectations, this article studies two refinancing episodes with very different fates. Lord Barnard failed in 1737 because his terms were too strict and financial agents induced a temporary market crash. Lord Pelham succeeded in 1750 because his better terms fit market prices, and interest rates had fallen much faster than expected.

Do human capital endowments trump location for knowledge-intensive industries? This article takes advantage of a natural experiment created by the end of the Soviet planned economy in 1991, which had geographically distributed R&D manpower according to planned needs as opposed to a distribution determined by a market economy. It examines the extent to which the planned economy created a path-dependence in the location of post-Soviet human-capital intensive production. The study finds that regions with more R&D personnel in 1991 did better in the development of modern market-oriented knowledge-intensive business services, like engineering and IT. Several explanations are offered for this path-dependence, with an emphasis on human capital externalities being the most plausible.

The merger movement between the First World War and the Great Depression played an important role in the evolution of the American banking industry. The first complete statistical series on mergers is presented and the factors that contributed to the merger are analyzed.

Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.

The United States economy completed its recovery from the Great Depression in 1942, restoring full-employment output in that year after 12 years of below-full-employment performance. Fiscal policies were not the most important factor in the 1933 through 1940 phase of the recovery, but they became the most important factor after 1940, when the recovery was less than half-complete. World War II fiscal policies were, then, instrumental in the overall restoration of full-employment performance.

Studies have shown a connection between finance and growth, but most do not consider how financial and real factors interact to put a virtuous cycle of economic development into motion. As the main transportation advance of the nineteenth century, railroads connected established commercial centers and made unsettled areas along their routes better candidates for development. We measure the strength of links between railroads and banks in seven Midwest states using an annual transportation geographic information system (GIS) database linked to a census of banking. These data indicate that those counties that already had a bank were more likely to see their first railroad go through over the next decade, while new banks tended to enter a county a year or two after a railroad was built. The initial banking system thus helped establish the rail system, while the rapid expansion of railroads helped fill in the banking map of the American Midwest.

Matching 2,777 R&D firms in surveys conducted by the National Research Council between 1921 and 1938 with U.S. patents reveals that 59 percent of all firms and 88 percent of publicly traded firms patented. These shares are much higher than those observed for modern R&D firms. Industry, firm size and the location of R&D facilities relative to major cities are shown to be important determinants of the propensity to patent. The effect of these factors remained constant across the 1920s and the Depression years suggesting that the tradeoff between patent disclosure and secrecy did not change over time.

Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of potential explanations, and find suggestive evidence that this is due to the superiority of slave wealth as a source of collateral for credit rather than any advantage in production. The collateral dimension of slave property magnifies its importance to historical American economic development.

In this article I provide a micro-level analysis of primary schooling in Victorian England. Using a new dataset of school-age males linked between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the determinants of childhood school attendance and the impact of attendance on adult labor market outcomes. I find that schooling had a positive effect on adult occupational class and that the associated wage gains were likely to have outweighed the cost of schooling. However, this effect was small relative to father's class, and the effect of education on earnings appears to have been small relative to modern results.

… for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting …. They withdraw from the struggle and become an aristocracy, which if it again plays a part in the course of affairs does so in a passive manner only, assuming the role of silent partners. In their place arise new men.…

The performance of the Italian economy just before World War I was relatively poor as a result of a backward productive structure. Among other reasons, this may have been caused by the lack of domestic coal reserves, especially given the features of nineteenth-century technology. However, many economic historians resist this argument since coal could be either imported or substituted. Although both solutions were attempted in Italy, this article demonstrates that neither solved the Italian energy problem. In particular, the contribution made by electricity was much less effective than many contemporaries and historians have suggested.

This article assumes that the only effect of slavery was the relief of a labor constraint facing individual farmers, and shows the conditions under which slavery would increase the share of agriculture in total output, reduce the size of the market for, and the incentive to invent and innovate, new farm machinery. Two farm models are developed, one with a fixed laborconstraint, the other with a rising labor supply-curve; these are contrasted with a third model of an unconstrained farm. The constrained (free labor) and unconstrained (slave labor) models successfully predict several salient differences between northern and southern agriculture and industry.

This paper measures the growth and relative levels of total factor productivity in the American, British, French, Belgian, and German mineral fuel pig iron industries from 1840 to 1909. The American history was peculiar in that there was little productivity growth betwen 1840 and 1870 and then rapid growth until 1890. Regression models are developed to identify the techniques responsible for the American advance. Much of the American experience is explained by changes in the composition of the available iron ores. An assessment of the international transferability of late-nineteenth-century blast furnace technology is offered.

The circumstances resulting in the Coinage Act of February 21, 1853 support Harry Johnson's thesis that historically fiduciary money has been substituted “for commodity-money in response to the interaction of scarcity of the latter and ingenuity in devising the former.” The Act of 1853 replaced bimetallism in the U.S. with a Composite Legal Tender System composed of a subsidiary small silver coinage adjunct to a de facto gold standard. After 1853 bimetallism remained only as a legal fiction which was finally terminated twenty years later.

Public mass modern education was a major pillar of state-led development in the post-Colonial period. I examine the impact of Egypt's transformation in 1951–1953 of traditional elementary schools (kuttabs) into modern primary schools on the Christian-Muslim educational and occupational differentials, which were in favor of Christians. The reform granted kuttabs' graduates (where Muslim students were over-represented) access to higher stages of education that were previously confined to primary schools' graduates. Exploiting the variation in exposure to the reform across cohorts and districts of birth among males in 1986, I find that the reform benefited Muslims but not Christians.