Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry.

… O, wot een gulden Neeringh

en voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh;

hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft en

winnende sijn brood God dank en eere gheeft.

Seventeenth-century English immigrants to the Chesapeake and their children experienced a trade-off. They died early and raised few children who survived to adulthood, most worked harder than in England at more boring tasks, and, except for food, they had a material standard of living inferior to what the homeland could offer at equivalent levels of wealth; but people ate well, there was work for all, and until late in the century the poor who lived long enough found opportunities not available in England to exercise control of their lives—opportunities to acquire land and the economic independence and community standing that it brought.

Under the Civil War pension act of 1862, Union Army widows were entitled to pensions; however, they lost these pensions if they remarried. Using a database compiled from widows' pension files, I estimate the effect this had on widows' remarriage decisions. I find that receiving a pension lowered the hazard rate of remarriage by 25 percent, which implies an increase in the median time to remarriage of 3.5 years. Among older women, the effect is greater. These results suggest that many Union Army widows faced highly unfavorable marriage prospects.

Previous studies of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have relied on votes recorded for the state blocs or a relatively small number of delegate votes. We construct a new data set covering delegate votes on over 600 substantive roll calls, and use the data in several ways. First, we estimate a single dimensional position for the delegates which reflects their overall voting patterns. Next, we explain these positions using a variety of delegate and constituent variables. Finally, we suggest a method for identifying state and floor medians, which can be used to predict equilibrium outcomes at the Convention.

Recent studies of job tenure raise the question of the appropriate duration statistic to use in historical research. This article compares duration measures and examines their empirical and theoretical implications for historical research on employment tenure. Using a variety of data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find that although there existed a sector of stable jobs, most industrial jobs were brief. Since World War I, however, there has been a sharp shift in the relative size and importance of the short- and long-term job sectors.

The orthodox view of U.S. reconversion after World War II relies on unacceptable GDP figures for the wartime economy and misinterprets the low level of unemployment during the war. For the postwar transtition, the emphasis on consumer demand financed by drawing down liquid assets accumulated during the war is inconsistent with the facts. The success of the transition depended on the reestablishement of “regime certainty,” which in turn depended on diminishing the influence of the more zealous New Dealers. Wartime and postwar political development created sufficient regime certainty for the postwar market system to generate genuine prosperity.

The International Steel Cartel of 1926 was a necessary step toward a coordinated system of cartels to govern steel exports. Like the present industrial policies of the European Community, however, differences in the aims of the domestic industries caused rivalry among the members of the 1926 agreement. Although thecartel was not able to fix its members' production shares, it was able to limit tradebetween them, which allowed for the formation and operation of their domesticcartels.

This article identifies four problems in the recent interdisciplinary studies of property rights, law, and economic development in the nineteenth-century United States. First, recent studies stress too exclusively the positive functions of law in either the “release of entrepreneurial energy” or the exploitative allocation of advantages (by courts and legislatures) to the business interests leading industrialization. Second, the dichotomy between alleged “instrumentalism” as the prevailing judicial style before 1860 and “formalism” after 1865 has been exaggerated. Third, generalizations have been based too much on the eastern states and Wisconsin. Fourth, there has been a failure to identify accurately the winners and losers in the struggle over regulation and the definition of property rights. Thus, although rediscovery of the importance of institutions by economists and the renaissance of legal history among historians and legal scholars constitute welcome (converging) developments in recent scholarship, much more research is needed on these main themes in the literature.

I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural United States, 1820–1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort’s county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard-deviation increase in market access reduced average stature by 0.14 inches, and rising market access over the study period can explain 37 percent of the contemporaneous decline in average stature, known as the Antebellum Puzzle. I find evidence that transportation affected health by increasing population density, leading to a worse epidemiological environment.

The small railway coal wagon was an early example held up to demonstrate Edwardian Britain’s technological stagnation. The small wagons have been blamed for inflated rail freight rates and depressed railway profits. What has been overlooked is that the small wagon was integral to the local coal market. The coal wagon was a substitute for costly distribution and delivery by road transport; although some railway specific costs may have been inflated, beyond the railhead other costs were economized. Seen in the appropriate context the small coal wagon was neither a bad choice nor an oddity.

The literature on national capital market integration in nineteenth-century America has overlooked the role of markets at a regional level. Such markets were important in reducing the possible burden of isolation by efficiently recycling local savings, and in promoting eventual integration into a national financial market. This article presents evidence that a commercial market centered on San Francisco extended into the Pacific Coast states and formed the basis for a regional financial market. The degree of market integration is measured through tests of interest rate covariability and convergence.

The Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence became in the early fourteenth century the largest merchant-bankers ever seen in medieval Europe. Their collapse in the 1340s has been attributed by most historians to huge losses on loans to Edward III of England. This article explores some flaws in the conventional explanation and shows that the firms lacked the resources to have made loans on the generally accepted scale. It also suggests means by which the companies could have recovered at least part of their advances to the king without the results appearing in government ledgers.

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy.

Using an event study approach, we find the announcement by the Bank of France in 1907 to accelerate gold payments directly for U.S. crops is associated with the ultimate upturn in U.S. equity prices. Spillover to the French financial markets accompanied the Regents’ decision to release sterilized reserves, thereby arresting the drainage of coin in French circulation. Counterfactual analysis shows that the facility alone would have been unlikely to end the crisis. Investors may have revised equity expectations upward, recognizing that the acceleration in reliable seasonal gold flows would relieve monetary stringency.

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.

“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”

A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875

“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”

H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837

The first price runs for Korean rice help us develop a Smithian physiocratic model to explain the low, stable prices of the eighteenth century and the rising, volatile prices of the nineteenth. Ownership rights provided incentives, and productivity after 1600 exceeded subsistence to achieve rural commercialization. Infrastructure investment from the late seventeenth century promoted development and prosperity, but declining investment, dysfunctional institutions, bad weather, and a population crash pushed the economy towards subsistence in the nineteenth. Decline saw rice monoculture, inflation, and price volatility even before imperialism's impact. Parallels with China suggest an “East Asian” premodern agricultural model.

I use a rich new dataset of Louisiana slave records to answer long-standing questions about manumission. I examine who was manumitted, by whom, and whether manumittees paid prices above market for their freedom, shedding some light on the debate of the efficiency of slavery. Legal changes after the Louisiana Purchase allow us to conclude that manumission laws were quite important in determining the terms at which manumission agreements were struck: when slaves lost the right to sue for self-purchase at market price, there was a precipitous drop in the number of manumissions, while prices paid increased.

The image of the “backward” immigrant has enjoyed a prominent place in American history, in large part because of the perceived “non-American” fertility behavior of many immigrant groups. The European perspective on these migrants, however, has been to see them as innovators, breaking free from the demographic constraints of the Old World. Drawing upon a large sample of reconstituted Norwegian immigrant families, this article examines the rising and then declining fertility of this group over the second half of the nineteenth century. It concludes that their fertility experience was influenced both by cultural tenacity and economic opportunity.

The article develops a model of gold-standard efficiency in the context of the theory of efficient asset markets. Efficiency is measured by the ratio of experienced disutility to the hypothetical loss under perfect gold arbitrage and neutral exchange-rate speculation. Dollar-sterling gold-point estimates for 1890 to 1906 are generated using the methodology of focusing on the dominant arbitrageurs, the prevailing exchange instrument, and the primary form of gold shipped. Gold- standard efficiency is remarkably high and only marginally below exchange- market efficiency from 1950 to 1966 under Bretton Woods.