A politicoeconomic model of the relationship between economic and structural variables and government popularity is developed and applied to the Weimar Republic. We obtained data from decentralized election results in the 1924 to 1933 period, using a weighted panel estimation method. Parameter estimates show a strong relationship between the development of economic variables and the decline in electoral support that confronted every government in this period. We link this finding to existing historiographie theories and extrapolate from it to estimate the effects of the economic recovery in the first years of the Nazi regime.

Scholars still disagree about why nineteenth-century Britain adopted the factory system. Traditional historians emphasize the scale requirements of new technology; radical economists stress the possibilities that factory production held for worker exploitation; other economists and economic historians argue that the factory system was preferred because of its superior transaction-cost properties. This paper tests these competing hypotheses by examining the technological and organizational developments in the British silk industry. It concludes that in this Industry technological factors were primarily responsible for the adoption of the factory system.

Historians disagree about whether geographic mobility on the frontier reflected economic hardship or opportunity because of the inability to observe the outcomes of non-persisters. This article uses a new sample of frontier families linked between the 1860, 1870, and 1880 U.S. censuses to study mobility and wealth accumulation. Using the incidence of Confederate guerilla warfare in frontier counties to generate exogenous migration, I find the effect of persistence on wealth accumulation is insignificant. Also, young, blue-collar, and landless families—those with the highest net benefits of migration—were the most likely to move. These findings reflect widespread economic opportunity on the frontier.

With passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the institutional structure necessary to support an American market for bankers' acceptances was created. This article examines the development of the secondary market for bankers' acceptances during its first 20 years. It provides evidence that discount market liquidity increased dramatically during the 1920s and helped the dollar acceptance challenge the sterling bill as an important source of trade finance around the world. The Federal Reserve Banks played a key role by reducing the risk borne by private dealers and propelling the market to a high-liquidity equilibrium.The author thanks Mike Haupert, William Roberds, and Ellis Tallman for their useful comments and suggestions, and Susan Isaac for her excellent editorial assistance. All errors are the responsibility of the author.

Throughout the period 1871–1938, the average British worker was better off than the average German worker, but there were significant differences between major sectors. For the aggregate economy, the real wage gap was about the same as the labor productivity gap, but again there were important sectoral differences. Compared to their productivity, German industrial workers were poorly paid, whereas German agricultural and service sector employees were overpaid. This affected the competitiveness of the two countries in these sectors. There were also important differences in comparative real wages by skill level, affecting the extent of poverty.

The boll weevil spread across the South from 1892 to 1922 with devastating effect on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor–intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of school attendance. We investigate the insect’s long-run effect on educational attainment using a sample of adults from the 1940 census linked back to their childhood census records. Both white and black children who were young (ages 4 to 9) when the weevil arrived saw increased educational attainment by 0.24 to 0.36 years. Our results demonstrate the potential for conflict between child labor in agriculture and educational attainment.

In developing the subject of this paper, “American Economic Growth before 1840,” I shall, relying for the most part on familiar materials, propose the hypothesis that economic growth per capita in the thirteen colonies of Britain in America advanced at a relatively rapid rate from about 1710 to 1775.1 shall also suggest that the level of living remained relatively low in these colonies as late as about 1710 and that for the new nation output per capita over the years 1775 to 1840 improved slowly if at all.

Surveys taken by the Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics in the 1890s reveal that unemployment was pervasive among unskilled workers. The incidence of unemployment was not associated with personal characteristics, but rather with the type of employment contract and job: those with high risk of layoff commanded a wage premium. Seasonality is an important part of this late nineteenth-century story, and the subsequent demise of seasonal activities may have had an important impact on the evolution of labor market institutions.

This study is based on the manuscript accounts of the Madrid Treasury for 1784– 1807. It confirms the customary view of an inexorable descent into bankruptcy, but also shows why this situation arose. A detailed analysis of receipts demonstrates the importance of colonial revenues and the stability of traditional income sources. In wartime, such as repeatedly plagued the country, the former was jeopardized and the latter proved too inelastic to respond to rising demand. On balance, the inescapable conclusion is that Spain was a limited fiscal entity which could not meet the challenge of a revolutionary era without breaking decisively with the restrictive structures of the Old Regime.

Much of the controversy over Mercantilist policies has focused on the relevance of political exigencies as against economic principles. Some economists have also attempted to evaluate Mercantilist policies in terms of the difference between various short-run and long-run adjustments. By contrast, the concern here has been with some purely economic but rather basic characteristics of the Mercantilist age. I have attempted to explain Mercantilist policies by the actual pattern of the specie flow, the characteristics of some of the commodity trade, the nature and limitation of foreign investment, and in terms of the existing monetary systems.

Recently the Atlantic slave trade has received scholarly attention through the work of European and American historians. Account books of European merchants engaged in the slave trade, studies of the exports of given continental ports, and analyses of special trade routes have all led to a greater understanding of the dynamics of the trade. Also, the important work of Philip Curtin on the volume and direction of the entire Atlantic slave trade has finally provided us with the rough parameters of the trade in terms of total numbers.

What accounts for the “epochal” changes in capital formation shares and capital goods' prices during the 1860's? The pages following document an epochal rise in American gross saving rates centered on the Civil War decade. They also establish a symmetrical episodic shift in the relative price of manufactured durable investment goods. Not only did the American investment share in GNP rise dramatically (and permanently) between the 1850's and 1870's, but the relative price of capital goods declined sharply over the same period. This relative price change was pronounced and it was never again repeated in a subsequent century of development.

This article shows how asymmetric information shaped slavery by determining the likelihood of manumission. A theoretical model explains the need to offer positive incentives to slaves working in occupations characterized by a high degree of asymmetric information. As a result, masters freed (and, more generally, rewarded) slaves who performed well. The model's implications are then tested against the available evidence: both in Rome and in the Atlantic world, slaves with high asymmetric information tasks had greater chances of manumission. The analysis also sheds light on the master's choices of carrots versus sticks and of labor versus slavery.

Industries that have different structures in Europe than in America can teach useful lessons about industrial evolution. Despite similar initial histories, European professional sports leagues adopted team promotion and relegation, which facilitates much easier entry than is possible in North America, where leagues themselves create new franchises to sell to investors. By contrasting the histories of the English Football League and the National Baseball League, we show that their structures arose from differences in geographic compactness, the entertainment level of games, and territorial monopolies. As the evolution becomes more understandable, the persistence of the intercontinental difference becomes more problematic.

The first domestic food to be regulated by the federal government in the United States, margarine had a unique regulation history. No other food products has been so harshly treated throughtout the world. The American margarine policy up to the 1950s is generally considered remarkably severe. The Canadian policy was even more stringent and more enduring. The province of Quebec, and until very recently of Ontario, still prohibits the yellow coloring of margarine. This article compares the history of margarine regulation in the two countries and uses the interest-group theory of government to investigate why it was so stringent.

“It is impossible to say definitely what percentage of the movement of slaves to the lower South was comprised in the domestic slave trade.…”

L. C. GrayGray, History, p. 658.

Between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves moved from the exporting areas to the importing areas of the United States South.Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics, p. 47. Gutman and Sutch (“Slave Family,” p. 99) estimate “more than a million slaves entered the interstate migration between 1790 and 1860.” For other estimates of the net migration of slaves (or blacks) within the United States, see Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 61–67; Bancroft, Slave-Trading, pp. 382–406 and sources therein; Lang, Effects, pp. 57–72; Sutch, “Breeding,” pp. 178–80; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, pp. 159–64; and Tadman, Speculators, pp. 237–47. These slaves either moved with their owners as whole plantations or were bought by interregional traders and shipped to the lower South. Until recent years historians had no way of estimating the share of sales in the interregional movement of slaves. Consequently, most of the early quantitative estimates of the interregional slave trade were vague or deliberately imprecise.According to Weld (Slavery, p. 13), “perhaps four-fifths or more” of the slaves were transported through the interregional slave trade. For the period 1820 to 1850, Collins (Domestic Slave Trade, p. 62) estimated that less than two-fifths of the migrants were carried south through the trade. According to Phillips (“Racial Problems, p. 223),” The conjecture of about 25,000 per year which has often been made for the interstate slave trade is probably as just an approximation as can be had.…” Bancroft (Slave-Trading, p. 398) “supposes that” the slave trade accounted for 70 percent of the slave exports. Stampp (peculiar Institution, p. 239) suggests that the slave trade accounted for “perhaps a majority” of the slave exports. According to Miller (“Note,” p. 182), “Estimates indicate that from two-fifths to one-half of these [slaves] may have been sold by their owners and moved by slave-traders to newer regions. Presumption lies in favor of the lower estimate,…”

Corporate farming is not new in the United States. The companies of “gentlemen adventurers” setting out in the seventeenth century to establish settlements in the New World were not corporations in a modern sense, but in organizational form and motivation they bear a striking resemblance to corporation farming ventures of recent decades. The twin lures of short-run profits and long-run capital gains have been major forces in shaping land use patterns and institutional structures throughout America's history. For over 300 years repeated efforts were made to use large scale organizational forms to reap these rewards in agriculture. Up to 1950 the record was one of almost consistent failure.

Did macroconomic interventions make any contribution to Argentina's revovery from the Great Depression? Macroeconomic policy deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of convertibility in 1929. Fiscal policy was conservative. Monetary policy became unorthodox after 1931, when the Caja de conversión began rediscounting to sterilize gold outflows and avoid deflation. This change predated the creation of the central bank in 1935. A wider literature links the interwar depression in the core to flaws in the gold standard, and active monetary policy to escape from defaltion and slump; our work extends this idea to the periphery.

The transition from a classless to a class society has been a major dilemma to Marxist economic historians. Using the Wolof social formation of West Africa as its historical example, this paper produces a class theoretic analysis of primitive communism. From this analysis, it is then able to show how such a transition could take place.