In 1822 New York became the first of many common law states to authorize the formation of limited partnerships. Little is known about the effects of these statutes. This article analyzes the use of the limited partnership in nineteenth-century New York City. We find that the form was adopted by a surprising number of firms, and that limited partnerships had more capital, failed at lower rates, and had fewer members with kinship ties, compared to ordinary partnerships. The results suggest that the introduction of the limited partnership facilitated investments that would not have occurred in the absence of the form.

Control of livestock disease had large spillover effects on human health. By 1900 the United States was a leader in livestock disease control, thanks to the efforts of the Bureau of Animal Industry. Its first chief, Daniel Salmon, established a model that would be copied around the world in campaigns against human and animal diseases. For the most part, the Progressive Era regulations to advance livestock health and food safety were spectacular successes. The bureau's main blunder was its failure to deal effectively with trichinosis, which was far more widespread than generally believed.

The spinning jenny helps explain why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain rather than in France or India. Wages were exceptionally high relative to capital prices in Britain, so the jenny was profitable to use in Britain but not elsewhere. Since it was only profitable to use the jenny in Britain, that was the only country where it as worth incurring the costs of developing it. Irrespective of the quality of their institutions or the progressiveness of their cultures, neither the French nor the Indians would have found it profitable to mechanize cotton production in the eighteenth century.

This article presents new estimates of time spent in home production in the United States during the twentieth century. Historical time-diary studies for various segments of the population are linked to estimates from recent time use surveys. The new estimates suggest that time spent in home production by prime-age women fell by around six hours from 1900 to 1965 and by another 12 hours from 1965 to 2005. Time spent by prime-age men rose by 13 hours from 1900 to 2005. Average across the entire population, per capita time spent in home production increased slightly over the century.

Investment in machinery is a key component in the analysis of long-term economic growth during the spread of industrialization. This article offers consistent annual series on the magnitude of machinery imports per capita into all Latin American countries for the period 1890-1930. Analysis of these series shows that machinery imports diverged across countries from 1890 through 1913. After 1913 a number of the more backward countries experienced rapid growth in machinery imports. These large differences in machinery investment contributed to unequal development across the Latin American countries.

Old Regime polities typically suffered from fiscal fragmentation and absolutist rule. By the start of World War I, however, many such countries had centralized institutions and limited government. This article uses a new panel data set to perform a statistical analysis of political regimes and public revenues in Europe from 1650 to 1913. Panel regressions indicate that centralized and limited regimes were associated with significantly higher revenues than fragmented and absolutist ones. Structural break tests also suggest close relationships between major turning points in revenue series and political transformations.

How does sovereign debt emerge? In the early nineteenth century, intermediaries' market power and prestige served to overcome information asymmetries. Relying on insights from finance theory, we argue that capitalists turned to intermediaries' reputations to guide their investment strategies. Intermediaries could in turn commit or else they would lose market share. This sustained the development of sovereign debt. This new perspective is backed by archival evidence and empirical data, and it suggests why strong but undemocratic states could borrow.

Peru's experience with sovereign debt during the guano boom is one of the most remarkable in the nineteenth century. Despite the country's ongoing political instability and poor capital market reputation, the price of Peruvian bonds soared shortly after settlement in 1849, and the country enjoyed relatively low credit risk until the 1870s. This article discusses the incentives Peru and its creditors faced, and explains how Peru's extraordinary performance in financial markets was founded on its credible commitment to service its debt with the guano proceeds.

The boll weevil is America's most celebrated agricultural pest. We analyze new county-level panel data to provide sharp estimates of the time path of the insect's effects on the southern economy. We find that in anticipation of the contact, farmers increased production, attempting to squeeze out one last large crop. Upon arrival, the weevil had a large negative and lasting impact on cotton production, acreage, and especially yields. In response, rather than taking land out of agricultural production, farmers shifted to other crops. We also find striking effects on land values and population movements.

While the pre-1914 mass migrations have been widely studied, the related pattern of emigrants' remittances is still largely untouched. This article aims at filling this gap by analyzing the contribution of remittances to financial stability. In the optimum currency area theory, labor mobility can ease the adjustment mechanism for countries under fixed exchange rate regimes. We confirm this claim by showing that emigrants' remittances reduced the incidence of financial disturbances among a sample of emerging economies characterized by substantial emigration. This result underscores the benefits for emerging economies from opening up to international factor flows, despite the associated financial turbulence.

“A fantastic rain of gold.” Thus observers in the decades between the nineteenth and the twentieth century described the influx of capital toward Italy generated by emigration remittances. These flows were spread piecemeal across the countryside of the entire peninsula, especially into the poorest regions of marginal mountain agriculture.1

According to conventional income measures, American and British industrial workers in the late nineteenth century were two to four times as wealthy as those in developing countries today. Estimated calorie expenditure elasticities of American and British industrial workers based on the 1888 Cost of Living Survey are greater than calorie elasticity estimates for developing countries today, which suggest that yesterday's wealthy workers were hungrier than today's poor. The result is robust to numerous criticisms. The finding implies an extraordinary improvement in nutritional well-being among the poor in the last century that has not been captured by our income estimates.

The henequen boom coincided with the rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). During the boom, many Maya in Yucatan lost their rights to land and moved to henequen haciendas. As part of the implicit contract with hacendados, peons accumulated large debts at the time of marriage, most of which were never repaid. We argue that the debts bound workers to the hacienda as part of a system of paternalism and that more productive workers incurred more debt. We examine the institutional setting in which debt operated and stress the formal and informal institutional contexts within which hacendados and workers negotiated contracts.

John Kenneth Turner1

We investigate determinants of slave family discounts in the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families unrelated to scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. We posit that because family members voluntarily cared for each other, sellers sometimes found it advantageous to keep families together (when families included needy or dependent members). Evidence from ship manifests carrying slaves for sale in New Orleans provides direct evidence for selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts. Children likely to have been shipped with their mothers are 1 to 2 inches shorter than other children.

This study presents fresh evidence on nutrition and health in colonial Kenya by using a new and comprehensive data set of African army recruits and civilians and applying a powerful measure of nutritional status: mean population height. Findings demonstrate huge regional inequalities, but only minor changes in the mean height of cohorts born 20 years before and after colonization. From 1920 onwards secular improvements took place, which continued after independence. I conclude that however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.

This article estimates the development of manuscripts and printed books in Western Europe over the course of thirteen centuries. As these estimates show, medieval and early modern book production was a dynamic economic sector, with an average annual growth rate of around one percent. Rising production after the middle of the fifteenth century probably resulted from lower book prices and higher literacy. To explain the dynamics of medieval book production, we provide estimates for urbanization rates and for the numbers of universities and monasteries. Monasteries seem to have been most important in the early period, while universities and laypeople dominated the later medieval demand for books.

Using a newly constructed panel data set, which includes annual estimates of lending rates for 47 Japanese prefectures, we analyze why interest rates converged over the period 1884–1925. We find evidence that technological innovations and institutional changes played an important role in creating a national capital market in Japan. In particular, the diffusion in the use of the telegraph, the growth in commercial branch banking networks, and the development of Bank of Japan's branches reduced interest rate differentials. Bank regulation appears to have played little role in impeding financial market integration.

This study contributes to a revised picture of nineteenth-century bilateralism. Employing a new disaggregated data set, it argues that bilateral treaties did not implement general free trade, but instead reduced tariffs unevenly through commodity-specific preferences, especially favoring manufactured goods. Gravity model estimates show that specific liberalizations increased exports of corresponding items, but not overall trade. Exporters from countries whose governments used bilateralism strategically to bring down partner tariffs benefitted most. Hence, the network in form and outcome is more properly identified with reciprocal liberalization practiced by the French than with British free-trade ideology.

Four million blacks left the South from 1940 to 1970, doubling the northern black workforce. I exploit variation in migrant flows within skill groups over time to estimate the elasticity of substitution by race. I then use this estimate to calculate counterfactual rates of wage growth. I find that black wages in the North would have been around 7 percent higher in 1970 if not for the migrant influx, while white wages would have remained unchanged. On net, migration was an avenue for black economic advancement, but the migration created both winners and losers.

Why do voters publicly fund education? I examine two explanations: public funds may be a means for decisive voters to transfer wealth to themselves or voters may subsidize the education of others to raise social education levels and realize external benefits. I test these theories in the 1800s, when full tax support of primary schools emerged. States where median and mean wealth was closer together had higher fractions of education revenue from public sources. Attendance rates rose when the public share of education funding rose, especially for poor children. These facts are consistent with a model with external benefits of education.

Bank distress peaked in New York City, at the center of the United States money market, in July and August 1931, when the banking crisis peaked in Germany and before Britain abandoned the gold standard. This article tests competing theories about the causes of New York's banking crisis. The cause appears to have been intensified regulatory scrutiny, which was a delayed reaction to the failure of the Bank of United States, rather than the exposure of money center banks to events overseas.