The life cycles of income and wealth form important traces of the economic history of households. Comparisons of cross-sectional estimates of the age-wealth profiles from 1774 to 1962 reveal little change in the basic pattern although crosssectional age-income or earnings profiles peak later in modern periods because of the increased investment in human capital.The wealth-income ratio appears to be declining. Multivariate regressions for Utah households show wealth-income patterns consistent with a life cycle model based on smoothing of consumption with little interaction between age and other determinants of economic position. Foreign birth has a positive effect on income while reducing wealth.

You cannot get them to talk of politics when they are well employed.— William Mathews, 1833.

I have observed during the whole time I have been in Lanarkshire that any rise in the rate of discount at the Bank of England has been immediately, or at least shortly, followed by an increase both of crime and of civil suits, and if it continues long, of mortality and typhus fever. So much so, that, as I am an official member of the prison board and of most of the Charities, I have always made it a rule to say … “Gentlemen, the Bank of England have raised their discounts, you had better immediately take measures for enlarging the prison accommodations and for extending the infirmaries and Poor houses.”—A. Alison, Sheriff of Lanarkshire, 1848.

“The peasant” is consistently cited as an obstacle to economic development in Africa. He is unwilling, it is said, to alter traditional practices and behavior, and is thus unable to take advantage of economic opportunities. As Stephen Enke puts it, “The resource in shortest supply, in most backward but developing countries, is officials who can argue ordinary people into forsaking tradition and risking new ways.” And E. S. Mason has stressed the complexity of “the process by which a group of tribally organized and self-sufficient peasants, sowing and reaping in accordance with age old traditions and possessing limited and easily satisfied wants, become a collection of risk-taking individuals, responsive to price and income incentives, and interested in conserving their land and improving its productivity.” In numerous instances, however, African farmers have rapidly accepted new crops and new techniques and have shown a high propensity to innovate, to accept risk, and to invest well in advance of returns. The sharp increases in the production of export crops show this to be true. Between 1919 and 1959, exports of Ghana (Gold Coast) rose 838 per cent, those of Nigeria 955 per cent, and those of (former) French West Africa 1,031 per cent. In all three cases, radical shifts in crop pattern and new practices in cultivation, planting, and harvesting were involved.

Using evidence from leases and price series, this article examines the total factor productivity of farming in the Paris Basin between 1450 and 1789. Existing evidence about productivity is unreliable, the article argues, and the leases provide historians with a new and valuable source for the study of productivity and economic growth. The article defends the methods used with the leases, which point to spurts of noteworthy growth on local farms but also to setbacks during times of war and increased taxation. It concludes with an analysis of the causes of economic growth in preindustrial agriculture.

Criticism of the Federal Reserve Board for not advancing rates earlier in 1919 to halt a rampant inflation is seldom as severe or nearly as devastating as the criticism heaped upon it for not easing credit sooner during the sharp but brief depression episode of 1920–1921. After the collapse of prices in May 1920, the immediate goal of Federal Reserve policy was to prevent a widespread financial crisis by maintaining the liquidity of the banking system. Congress had created the Federal Reserve System for the specific purpose of preventing a recurrence of the financial panics that had plagued our pre-World War I monetary experience. In 1920 the Federal Reserve Banks succeeded in this task by making funds freely available at relatively high discount rates. Somewhat surprising is the fact that there was no liquidation of bank credit nor decline in the money supply during the first six months of the downswing. Loans at commercial banks continued to increase, and member-bank indebtedness continued to rise. The action taken by System officials probably warded off what might easily have been the worst financial catastrophe in our history. Unfortunately, the policy they pursued, though successful in preventing a banking crisis, was inimical to a quick recovery of business activity. Inventory decumulation, particularly in the agricultural sector, was hampered by a bumper harvest and a railway transportation bottleneck which was not eliminated until October.

The literature on French economic history generally dates the onset of the agricultural revolution in France from the midnineteenth century. However, the available empirical evidence on national agricultural trends, brought together in 1961 by Toutain, shows that the rapid, sustained growth in both total and per capita agricultural production comes earlier, during the period from 1815–24 to 1865–74. This article explores the sources of this rapid national growth by assembling and analyzing previously unutilized regional data on production and hectares of major field crops. The southern diffusion of mixed farming is identified as the change in the productive process which may account for the French agricultural revolution.

This article examines the determinants of interprefectural patterns of Japanese emigration to the U.S. Pacific Northwest, using a multiple regression analysis. In estimating the regression equations, new proxies are introduced for the “family- and-friends” effect that are free of the statistical problems common in previous studies on long-distance migration. The result shows that the information networks that developed between pioneer immigrants and their home districts played a central role in shaping emigration patterns. The lack of an alternative means of obtaining reliable information about conditions in the United States appears to be responsible.

Estimates of total and per capita product for Barbados are derived for 1665 and 1666 and 1699 to 1701 from trade statistics and new data on the distribution and composition of produce entered into the customs books of the island. The share of exports in total product–central to the estimate of total product–is linked to the share of the labor force in the export sector. Per capita Barbados product is estimated to have been one- to two-thirds higher than in England and Wales, and per capita exports are estimated well above those of their Chesapeake counterparts.

An index of childhood mortality is proposed as a good measure of socioeconomic well-being and inequality. The index is used to investigate the relationship between childhood mortality and occupation and income of parents. The sources consist of the 1900 United States Census public-use sample and the published 1911 Census of Marriage and Fertility of England and Wales. Results revealed more inequality in mortality and income across social-class groupings in England and Wales than in the United States. The outcome arose more because of relatively higher childhood mortality for white-collar groups in the United States than because of a better situation for blue-collar groups.

The expansion of staple agriculture into the American West after the Civil War was an important event in the economic history of both the United States and the world. This migration of commercial farmers transformed the world's commodity markets. We would expect to find that these farmers were responding to price signals in a commercial fashion. Curiously, the existing literature has failed to detect a price responsiveness in western expansion. This failure appears to stem from a lack of appreciation of the importance of the spatial distribution of prices in the late nineteenth century. This study shows that when this factor is considered, the expansion of western cultivation clearly is connected to the prevailing local price of wheat.

A distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century international economy was the mass movement of people out of Europe. Between 1840 and 1914 over forty million persons permanently left Europe and settled in the New World, Asiatic Russia and Oceana. In contrast with contemporary population transfers, nineteenth-century international migration occurred within an international political framework which placed few restrictions on geographic mobility. Within this institutional context there were substantial country by country differences in the participation of European populations. This article is concerned with the secular determinants of intercountry differences in emigration.

In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income in the post-bellum South. The Civil War itself had a much smaller and less lasting effect on southern income than Coldin and Lewis assumed; in the long run, it was the least important of the three shocks.

According to the articles of association forming the Medici partnerships, the purpose of the banco in Florence and of the branches abroad was “to deal in exchange and in merchandise with the help of God and good fortune.” When we ask just what is meant by dealings in exchange and in merchandise, we are led to examine how the Medici raised the funds with which they operated, to study their role as fiscal agents of the papacy and lessees of the Tolfa alum mines, to consider the technique they used in international banking, and to look into the reasons for their failure. The Medici did not innovate in international banking, they followed existing business practice; but their records are an extremely valuable source of information, if only for the sake of comparison. Let us begin by finding out what is meant by dealings in exchange and then tackle the other problems.

For techniques diffusing as commodities, sales form a critical medium of technological communication which facilitates secondary invention. While sales may also influence the incentives to invent, I argue that the technical learning associated with selling provides a fuller account of invention for the case of the sewing machine in the United States. A study of some 3,500 patents and forty-eight city directories shows that as sales expanded in extent and location, so did patenting by first-time inventors. Moreover, patent use generated a flow of information back to inventors which increased the likelihood and extent of repeat patenting. In these ways, sales sustained technological change as a cumulative process.

From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati’s scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China’s scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati’s scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress.

A common element revealed by comparative history of four Asian countries is a major shift in the momentum of agricultural growth from an extension of cultivation frontiers to an agricultural system that uses land more intensively. Improvements in land infrastructure, such as irrigation and drainage, are identified as preconditions for the development of land-saving farming technology. Public investments in land infrastructure were induced by the higher rates of return to irrigation construction and improvements than to new land opening.

By the end of the Civil War 186,017 black men had served in the Union Army, roughly three-quarters of whom were former slaves. Because most black soldiers were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. Their wartime experience depended upon their peers, their commanding officers, and where their regiment toured and affected their later life outcomes. In the short run the combat units benefited from company homogeneity, which built social capital and minimized shirking, but in the long run men's human capital and acquisition of information was best improved by serving in heterogeneous companies.

Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, we explore the rise and fall of pellagra (a disease caused by inadequate niacin consumption) in the American South. We first consider the hypothesis that the South’s monoculture in cotton undermined nutrition by displacing local food production. Consistent with this hypothesis, a difference in differences estimation shows that after the arrival of the boll weevil, food production in affected counties rose while cotton production and pellagra rates fell. The results also suggest that after 1937 improved medical understanding and state fortification laws helped eliminate pellagra.