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.

This article tests the hypothesis that price shocks in international commodity markets would by themselves have led to a fall in agricultural labor demand in rural Ireland in the absence of the Famine. This hypothesis has been used by revisionist historians to argue that the Famine was not a structural break between two distinct eras in Irish economic history. In refuting the hypothesis, this article joins a more recent cliometric tradition that has sought to restore the Famine to its rightful place as a major watershed in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the greater profitability of the mergers indicates they were a better fit to the economic environment than their smaller predecessors, their creation was only made possible by a special combination of historical circumstances.

I suggest that converting economic history from a topic to a discipline requires three steps: economic theory and quantitative methodology must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good economic history; economic history and historical statistics must be relevant and necessary for writing and teaching good economic theory; and economic history must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good history. Over the past 50 years the first task has been accomplished and the second nearly so. The third task remains, but incorporating the life-cycle perspective into economic history would hasten its successsful completion.

This article examines the relationship between capital market development and industrial structure during the early stages of industrialization, contrasting the experiences of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. It argues that constraints placed on the formation of credit intermediaries in Latin America by poorly defined property rights and government regulatory policies produced greater concentration in the Mexican and Brazilian cotton textile industries than that which developed in the United States.

We explain the origins of the Panic of 1857, examine its spread, and compare state banking systems's responses. We describe the decline in western land and railroad investments and the consequent stress on securities brokers and banks in eastern cities, and trace the transmission of the shock to other regions. Bank performance depended not only on regional conditions and links to eastern banks, but on the ability to coordinate behavior. Southern branch banks and coinsuring banks in Ohio and Indiana were particularly successful.

This examination of official commercial statistics suggests that the conventional wisdom regarding early free-trade efforts of Britain and France is wrong. French average tariff levels were, surprisingly, consistently below those of Britain throughout most of the nineteenth century, even after the abolition of the Corn Laws and before passage of the 1860 Treaty of Commerce. Previous scholarship has focused on French commercial policies covering a narrow range of items and has largely ignored the overall trade policies of both nations. This study moves us further away from stories of development and trade confined to a few “leading”sectors.

What do economic historians do? I analyze quantitatively The Journal of Economic History's contents since its founding, showing subfields, nations, and periods studied, and which scholars and universities have contributed. The timing, extent, and participants of the cliometric revolution are investigated. New rankings of economic history programs are made.

The record of British and French finance during the Napoleonic wars presents the striking picture of a financially strong nation abandoning the gold standard, borrowing heavily, and generating inflation, while a financially weaker country followed more “orthodox” policies. This paradoxical behavior is explained by Britain's strong credibility that allowed more flexible policies, while France's poor reputation forced reliance on taxation.

Organized markets in public lands enabled large slaveholders to establish a foothold on the frontier, often in advance of their actual settlement. Their “pre-emptive” purchases of prime cotton lands fostered the regional differentiation of territory by displacing yeoman households to more marginal soils. An analysis of the land market in western Georgia in the 1820s demonstrates the regional patterning of the new territory at the very onset of settlement. The state's land policy, a lottery system, ordained this outcome, as it instituted markets in public lands to which wealthy slaveholders had greater access.

This article uses a variety of data in a simple regression framework to test various hypotheses about the regional differences in U.S. bank rates of return existing before 1915. We find that the observed pattern in the return differences is a function of the measures of bank returns used in previous studies, regional differences in economic conditions, restrictions on interstate branch banking, and private bank minimum capital requirements. These results are inconsistent with most of the bank monopoly-power hypotheses in the literature.

This article uses evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses to investigate the correlates of the wealth of adult males in Chicago. The analysis reveals rapidly increasing wealth with age, a substantial positive effect on wealth of duration of residence in the city, and an absence of any significant impact of nativity on wealth when controlling occupation. Mean wealth rose from well below the national average in 1850 to a level far above the national average in 1860. Together these results suggest that early Chicago was a place of exceptional economic opportunity for settlers.

Surveys taken by the Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics in the 1890s reveal that unemployment was pervasive among unskilled workers. The incidence of unemployment was not associated with personal characteristics, but rather with the type of employment contract and job: those with high risk of layoff commanded a wage premium. Seasonality is an important part of this late nineteenth-century story, and the subsequent demise of seasonal activities may have had an important impact on the evolution of labor market institutions.

Reliance on a “representative firm” approach in studying industrial behavior during the Great Depression obscures economically interesting patterns. A newly discovered data source lets us form and study an establishment-level panel dataset on the motor vehicles industry, one of the largest in 1929. Substantial intraindustry heterogeneity led to large composition effects in employment, output, and productivity: the large number of plants that shut down were unlike the continuing ones. Oddly, output does not seem to have shifted among continuing producers to the relatively low-cost ones. Reconciling these should illuminate links between industrial organization and macroeconomics.

This article attempts to explain why the adoption of potentially productive institutions is delayed and why inefficient ones persist by exploring the dynamics of institutional change in a particular historical case—the closing of the Georgia open range in the late nineteenth century. A closed range policy would have generated net benefits for specific regions of Georgia, but distributional conflicts, coupled with high transaction costs, made a voluntary agreement to do that unattainable. The article describes the Georgia legislature's important role in facilitating the adoption of a policy that led to more rapid agricultural development in the postbellum period.

This article estimates the contribution of farm household members to agricultural output in the antebellum northern United States. I reject the hypothesis that children contributed more in the least settled regions. The contribution of young children and teenage females was greatest in the Old Northwest; teenage boys made their largest contribution in the Northeast. In the Midwest young males and females performed the same tasks, namely market production and land clearing, but in the Northeast males were more likely to specialize in market production and females in household production.

We estimate the monthly and hourly earnings ratio between agricultural and manufacturing laborers, adjusting for compensation received in-kind and differences in the cost of living. Our results indicate that prior to the Great Depression, agricultural compensation was similar to that in manufacturing within geographic regions, and a substantial earnings gap in favor of manufacturing emerged in the early thirties.

Microeconomic evidence reveals that the incidence and duration of unemployment in the 1930s varied significantly within the labor force. Long-term unemployment, which was especially high by historical standards, may have been exacerbated by federal relief policies.

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.

This article provides estimates of Belgian food consumption in 1812 and 1846 using a national food balance sheet approach. These estimates are then converted into caloric intakes for adult male equivalents. Despite many accounts of an absolute pauperization of the Belgian population during this period, caloric consumption per equivalent adult male is shown to have merely stagnated between 1812 and 1846. There is indirect evidence that inequality in caloric consumption increased at the same time. Energy cost-accounting exercises reveal that the residual caloric quantity available for physical exertion was minimal for large sections of the population.