Governments frequently establish institutions to govern the transition in property rights when they acquire territory or experience radical changes in political regimes. By examining a specific example—the United States' acquisition of California from Mexico in 1848, this article investigates general questions about these institutions and institutional choice. The article fmds that the specific institution that Congress chose for California best balanced the interests of the federal government, American owners of land grants, and American squatters and settlers. Further, despite the lobbying, litigation, and delay associated with the institution, the institution was more efficient than prior institutions.

Between 1890 and 1938 Japan experienced rapid economic growth. India stagnated. This national divergence was reflected in the performance of both countries' leading modern industiy, cotton textiles. The parallels between national and industry performance suggest the problems of the Indian textile industry may have been those of India as a whole. Weak management is widely blamed for poor performance in textiles. An analysis of managerial decisions in Bombay shows, however, that on all measurable dimensions Indian managers performed as well as they could. The problem instead was one factor they could not change—the effort levels of Indian workers.

Formal rules and informal customs created innumerable obstacles to the socioeconomic advance of Virginia's free black population. Laws prohibited free blacks from some activities and occupations and restricted their participation in others. Racism and Klan-like terrorism also made advancement difficult. Despite these disadvantages, Virginia's free black population fared rather well. They grew nearly as tall as white Americans and towered over contemporaiy Europeans. Primary sources and the secondary literature are consistent with the anthropometric evidence.

The impact of the Great Depression was milder in the South Atlantic states, more severe in the Mountain states, and surprisingly uniform across other regions of the countly—despite large differences in industrial structere. Employing data on 20 manufacturing industries disaggregated by state, we analyze the relative contributions of industry mix and location to regional variations in economic performance. Industrial composition had a significant impact on employment growth, with regions that concentrated on durable goods or inputs to construction faring worse than others. Long-run trends also mattered, and explain much of the South Atlantic's more favorable performance.

I examine the change in prices of foreign sovereign dollar bonds over several weeks in 1930 that marked major legislative progress for the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. If the market was preoccupied by anticipated debt-repayment problems arising from the tariffs, this should be visible in the cross-countty pattern of bond prices. The bond price data are compared to indicators of country sensitivity to the tariffs and debt service. A significant relationship is found for bond price changes in June 1930, but the size of the effect is very small. Analysis at the regional and individual country level reveals some puzzling cases.

Few systematic studies of the effects of patronage on public-sector employees' wages and working conditions exist. Exploiting a sample of nearly 90,000 workers, this article provides systematic evidence: Where patronage was widespread, state and local employees earned 40 percent more per hour; worked 16 to 17 percent fewer hours; and earned 22 percent more per week than comparable private-sector workers. Public-sector wage premia varied; low-skilled workers, and workers in Baltimore and New York, enjoyed relatively large wage premia. Wages were less dispersed in the public sector than in the private, suggesting that pay scales reflected politics, not marginal products.

We examine the Austro-Hungarian bentwood furniture industry as a case study for modem industrialization during the second half of the nineteenth centuly. We establish that, through the implementation of innovative production methods and aggressive and insightful marketing strategies, this industry constitutes an important example of the modem industrial enterprise. Furthermore, we find evidence of cooperative behavior in the industry, making it an interesting case study in the history of industrial organization.

Corporate groups have been very important in the economies of many developing countries, including prewar Japan, where zaibatsu controlled approximately one-third of the capital stock. Regression analysis of a new firm-level financial data set distinguishes the economic behavior of zaibatsu member firms from independent firms. The only significant difference between old-zaibatsu member firms and independent firms is that some measures of earnings of old zaibatsu were less stable. The earnings of new-zaibatsu firms were higher, faster-growing and less variable than those of independent firms. These results cast doubt on the anecdotal literature about old zaibatsu.

State personal income per capita estimates at six census years are adjusted for state differences in prices and labor input per capita. Decomposition of the variation in state nominal income levels into the contributions of prices, demography, and (residual) labor productivity reveals considerable diversity in the relative importance of each by region and period. Convergence rates across the century differ according to the choice of series (nominal income, price-adjusted income, or productivity). The West and the South play crucial roles in regional convergence, but at different times.

Scholars have long held strong views about the nature and extent of grain storage in early modern Europe. Direct evidence on the issue is quite poor and inconclusive.1 Randall Nielsen's ambitious attempt at solving the problem in a recent issue of this JOURNAL therefore deserves serious attention.2 Like others before him, Nielsen uses inferences from price behavior in assessing the nature of grain storage. Nielsen identifies three distinguishing implications of profit-maximizing storage for grain price structure.

Prices rose in most years between 1933 and 1941 even though output was substantially below trend. This inflation cannot be explained as simply the effect of devaluation and changes in expectations. Rather, because prewar price changes depended significantly on the growth rate of real output, the extraordinarily rapid growth after 1933 was an important force leading to inflation. At the same time, the NIRA, by encouraging minimum wages and collusive pricing arrangements, caused a crucial diminution of the usual deviation-from-trend effect. The conjunction of these forces caused inflation at a time when the U.S. economy remained depressed.

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures “played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita” in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

Studies of the contemporary period for the United States and for Canada have established that the presence of an immigrant population is associated with an increase in trade between the immigrants' host and origin countries. We wish to discover if such a protrade phenomenon was systematically associated with the massive inflow of immigrants to the United States during the 40 years preceding World War I. Applying a gravity model to U.S. imports of 78 commodities from 17 countries at five-year intervals, we find support for a broad pro-import immigrant effect, especially for more fmished and more differentiated goods.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the phenomenon of economic growth. The interest was sparked by the introduction of new models by Paul Romer and Robert Lucas. The neoclassical Solow growth model, despite its influence over the years, has a fundamental flaw: growth is determined exogenously. The new models by Romer and Lucas solve for the growth rate of the economy endogenously. In these models, due to spillovers in capital or in human capital, growth can go on indefinitely. In a later work, Romer argued that increasing returns are necessary elements in models of technological innovations, which in turn form the foundation for endogenous growth models. The theoretical innovations in modeling growth stimulated a significant body of empirical work.