We exploit the records of a large Toledan hospital to study the compensation of female labor and the gender wage gap in early modern Castile in the context of nursing—a non-gendered, low-skill occupation in which men and women performed the same clearly defined tasks. We employ a robust methodology to estimate the value of in-kind compensation, and show it to constitute a central part of the labor contract, far exceeding subsistence requirements. Patient admissions records are used to measure nurse productivity, which did not differ across genders. Female compensation varied between 70 percent and 100 percent of male levels, with fluctuations clearly linked to relative labor scarcity. Contrary to common assumptions in the literature, we show that markets played an important role in setting female compensation in early modern Castile. The sources of the gender disparity are, therefore, likely to be found in the broader social and cultural context.

This article examines the role of the agricultural crisis in the international transmission of the Great Depression and assesses the direct and indirect macroeconomic effects of the agricultural price decline. Using panel data for 16 countries, it is shown that the decline in agricultural prices adversely affected the general price level, consumption and investment. Furthermore, it is shown that the agricultural price decline was an important vehicle by which the Depression was transmitted internationally.

Few would deny that the U.S. economy is today dominated by huge corporations. Much recent writing has proposed that these corporations form a stable and monopolistic (or oligopolistic) “core” around which a more competitive “peripheral” sector exists. Firms in the core are said to be “eternal,” while firms in the periphery demonstrate the mortality and high turnover expected in competitive industries. In another context, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy emphasized the permanence of big corporations when they noted:

The evolution from indentured to redemptioner servitude as a means of financing immigration to late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania is documented. The compensating differences between methods are used to explain contract choice. The rate of return to shipping redemptioners is estimated and compared with the default rate needed to make it a competitive return. The expected incidence of defaults and the implications for risk pooling among families and risk spreading across voyages are investigated.

The hypothesis that the fear of foreclosure of farm mortgages provided an important impetus to American agrarian reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reconsidered. This hypothesis is consistent with the observation that farm income, although volatile, on average improved over this period.Indeed, despite low average foreclosure rates, the temporary effects of foreclosures on specific regions in which there was unrest appears to have been dramatic. An examination of indebtedness data and measures of unrest both for the period of the Alliance movement and for the era of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota appears to support the hypothesis linking the fear of foreclosure to agrarian unrest.

Empirical studies of delegate voting at the Constitutional Convention have relied on the same 16 roll call votes. This article re-examines various assumptions used in the collection of these data. We first create a baseline regression. We then consider the effect of dropping delegates not in attendance, re-inferring the votes from primary sources, examining various subsamples of the roll calls, and reconstructing constituency variables to include state districts. Our findings suggest that personal interests were indeed important for decision making at the Constitutional Convention, but constituent interests were less important than previously claimed.

Prior to the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s, the pay gap between African-American and white workers in the South was large overall, but also quite variable across location. Using 1940 census data, I estimate the white-black earnings gap of men for separate county groups called state economic areas, adjusting for individual differences in schooling and experience. I show that the gap was significantly greater in areas where, ceteris paribus, blacks were a larger proportion of the workforce, plantation institutions were more prevalent, more of the population was urban, and white voters exhibited segregationist preferences.

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.

This paper uses an unexpected trade disruption due to World War I to study how a temporary reduction of imports affects the entry of industrial firms. I construct a new transportation network to capture counties’ exposure to this trade shock and compile panel data to examine the impact on China’s manufactured textile industry. I find that counties with greater prewar exposure to international trade experienced more firm entry after the war. The effect was delayed because the war simultaneously hindered machinery imports. Better access to finance also contributed to firm entry after the trade shock.

We study the effect of political uncertainty on economic outcomes using the case of Huey Long's tenure as governor and senator of Louisiana during the Great Depression. Based on primary sources, we construct two well-established measures of uncertainty specifically for Louisiana: stock price volatility and newspaper mentions of terms related to “uncertainty” and the economy. Combining these uncertainty measures with employment data from the Census of Manufactures, we attempt to identify the effects of political uncertainty using the state of Mississippi as a control group. We find little support for a negative effect from political uncertainty in Huey Long's Louisiana.

We analyze the effects of ownership of liberty bonds on election outcomes in the 1920s. We find that counties with higher liberty bond ownership rates turned against the Democratic Party in the presidential elections of 1920 and 1924. This was a reaction to the depreciation of the bonds prior to the 1920 election (when the Democrats held the presidency) and the appreciation of the bonds in the early 1920s (under a Republican president), as the Federal Reserve raised and then subsequently lowered interest rates. Our analysis suggests that the liberty bond campaigns had unintended political consequences.

The theme of this conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” implies a concern for specifying the limits of the applicability of classical and neo-classical economic theory. Presumably because we sociologists have been in the forefront of those who insist on the recognition of these limits, I have been asked to present a paper from the viewpoint of historical sociology. Now I suppose that your field and mine are alike in at least one respect: the infrequency of finding any one view on a broad and significant question. I am sure you will understand, therefore, my concentration on some lessons to be learned from the work of one of the heroes of my discipline, Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber, as you may know, was, among his other titles, a professor of economics and avoided the epithet of “sociologist.” Yet because sociology has changed since his day, largely under his influence, and because he was also a professor of law and of political science, we sociologists have now claimed him. Nevertheless, many of the issues that informed his massive scholarly research were and are issues central to both your field and mine.

Every generation has interpreted the monetary experience of the colonies in the light of its own problems. The Jacksonian period produced the interpretations of Gouge just as the silver controversy of the 1890's produced the work of Bullock and Davis. The reaction to the financial fundamentalism of the 1890's came largely from the work of R. A. Lester and the unpublished but celebrated work of L. Brock in the late thirties and early forties, heavily influenced by the experience of the depression. From the latter two, a new orthodoxy has emerged among American historians, under the authority of E. James Ferguson, whose important recent study, The Power of the Purse, defends the paper money currencies of the colonies by a well-reasoned appeal to the modern fiscal practice of financing war by inflation.

This paper examines age-specific and differential fertility, both marital and total, and nuptiality for census samples of white Philadelphia families headed by native white Americans, Germans, and Irish for 1850–1880. Using Philadelphia Social History Project data, own-children techniques are employed to construct age-standardized child-woman ratios and age-specific total and marital fertility rates. Conclusions are that the low fertility among native whites was due to both low marital fertility and later marriage; that rapid declines in marital fertility occurred among second generation migrants; and that variations existed in marital fertility across occupational groupings within ethnic groups.

Like many land-abundant, labor-scarce economies, Thailand had a well-developed system of property rights in man. Over the nineteenth century corvée and slavery were abolished and replaced by military conscription, a head tax, and more precise property rights in land. Concomitant trends included extensive commercialization, the growth of international trade, imperialist threats to Thai sovereignty, and the growth of a centralized unitary state. Both domestic and international political motives influenced monarchs in the abolition of human-property rights. Economic change greatly facilitated these institutional changes.

Between 1900 and 1940, organized industry and the federal government, acting in conjunction with the states, created an American social welfare system. The two major participants in this process evolved along similar lines during this period. Both began as simple organizations and developed into complex, functional bureaucracies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the federal government did not exist as a social welfare entity. Private corporations, the first to face the administrative and economic problems posed by the development of national markets, created social welfare systems for their employees long before the New Deal. Until the depression, these efforts enjoyed clear supremacy. By the end of the 1930s, however, a distinctly “public” social welfare bureaucracy and program had been developed on the federal level. Corporations and the state underwent similar changes but at different times, and the difference in timing influenced their relations. This essay describes the growth of these public and private bureaucracies and identifies their similarities and differences during the early twentieth century.

This article investigates the impact of the socioreligious segregation of Dutch society on the asset allocation choices of rural bankers and the withdrawal behavior of their depositors during the early 1920s. Results suggest that cooperatively-owned Raiffeisen banks for both Catholic and Protestant minority groups could limit their exposure to a debt-deflation crisis, despite operating more precarious balance sheets than banks for majorities. Business histories demonstrate how strict membership criteria and personal guarantors acted as screening and monitoring devices. Banks serving minorities functioned as club goods, managing their exposure to the crisis by exploiting the confessionalized nature of Dutch society.

Between the 1880s and 1930s, apprenticeship was transformed from an institution dominated by employers to one dominated by unions. Prior to this transformation, employers leveraged their ability to hire, fire, and discipline at will by requiring apprentices to post forfeitable performance bonds. Despite their financial interest in the resolution of contract disputes, employers who withheld employees' bonds judged their own cases. Agency theory helps explain the use and abuse of bonding schemes and their role in the subsequent transformation of apprenticeship.