This paper brings together the existing commercial bank balance sheets for New England for the period 1785–1837. Approximately 79 percent of all balance sheets issued have been found, and data from these are presented in aggregated form. Data compiled from available statements were then used to estimate the balance sheets of missing banks and the missing items on individual balance sheets. The variables used in estimating included authorized capital stock, a time trend, age of bank, city population, paid-in capital, deposits, loans and discounts, bank notes in circulation, and reserves. The actual and estimated balance sheets are then combined and presented.

Langdon Cheves's role as president of the Second Bank of the United States (1819–1822) warrants reassessment. First, he did not save the bank from threatened failure, since it was, in truth, already sound. Second, he was irresponsible in accumulating huge excess reserves during the depression year of 1820; reserves estimated here as sufficient to support an increase of up to 17 percent in the volume of notes and deposits in the U.S. money supply.

We examine (1) why, when a national capital market developed in the United States, regional interest rate differentials existed and seemed to narrow toward 1900, and (2) the changing patterns of banking behavior in the post-Civil War period. We show that a national capital market was established early (1870s), and regional rate differentials were a response to variations and changes in the interest sensitivity of business loan demand. Bank structure was characterized by monopoly, but it declined because of increasing sophistication of business financing decisions, which became more sensitive to open market rates (in particular the stock market) and to loan rates themselves.

A radical shift in the industrial composition of investment and final demand played an important role in delaying a complete recovery from the trough of 1932. Under the conditions of technological discovery prevailing in the 1930s, this shift in the composition of demand made full employment virtually impossible to achieve as recovery from the crash got under way. A complete recovery required a mass of interrelated new techniques and human and physical capital which, in the timid financial environment prevailing after 1929 (and given the uncertainties of the New Deal), could not be organized on the necessary scale by private investment markets. These findings pose a new agenda for research on the political economy of the New Deal and on the economic history of the post-World War II era.

Over the 1919–1929 period, fluctuations in the value of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange exercised statistically significant and economically important impacts on the demand to hold cash balances. The marked post–1925 rise in the volume and value of stock trading led to a measurable increase in the transactions demand to hold cash balances, an increase in demand not recognized or seriously discussed by individuals inside or outside of the system. Had it been recognized, it is unlikely that the Fed would have persisted in its antispeculative policies in 1928–1929, policies associated with rises in interest rates and the beginnings of a downturn in real activity in the second quarter of 1929.

During the five years of inflation, price stability, and hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, three factors determined the growth of the money supply. First, the Reichsbank freely issued money in exchange for whatever government or corporate debt the private sector did not wish to hold at the official discount rate. Second, the government persistently ran large deficits. Political instability and the inflation itself prevented taxation adequate to pay for social programs, subsidies to the railroad and businesses, and reparations to the Allies. The third factor was expectations of inflation, which, as they became more pessimistic, led people to hold less and monetize more of the outstanding stock of debt. Thus, the money supply was partly endogenous and partly dependent on government fiscal policy. The monetary policy of the Reichsbank, although essential to the inflation process, was a constant and passive one until stabilization at the end of 1923.

An important change in the structure of U.S. institutions occurred when the government under the Articles of Confederation was replaced by a new government under the Constitution. In 1913, Charles A. Beard proposed a view of the formation of the United States Constitution—an economic interpretation—that remains a much discussed yet unresolved explanation of the behavior and motives of the men who wrote the document. This paper provides the first rigorous statistical test of this issue. We summarize the preliminary results of a statistical analysis of the relationship between the voting behavior of individual delegates involved in the making of the Constitution and their economic and personal characteristics. Contrary to current historical wisdom, significant patterns related to economic interests are found in the voting, with the division of interests generally consistent with that outlined by Charles A. Beard seventy years ago.

Analysis of balance-of-payments components with Spain and Spanish America helps account for spectacular economic gains to the United States in the neutrality years and for the subsequent turn to net deficit positions during the 1810s. Excess export values at constant prices with Spain and favorable terms of trade with Spanish America decisively contributed to large surpluses on commodity account through 1795–1813. Most cycles in merchandise trade are consistent with greater demand elasticities for exports than for imports.Net earings on freight, insurance, and mercantile profits boosted overall returns from the Spanish Empire at the very times when they were most needed to finance the re-export trade and to settle deficits elsewhere.

This paper utilizes a survey of U. S. manufacturing firms from 1832 to investigate the structure of manufacturing investment during early industrialization. The relative magnitudes of investments in fixed and working capital, and how they varied with firm size, location, and industry, are documented. This variation across industries in the composition of capital investments is indicative of a more general variation in factor intensities, and bears on the issues of why industries became concentrated in the regions they did, and the degrees to which they were adversely affected by the limited availability of long–term loans. Evidence that most manufacturing industries had quite modest investments in machinery and tools per unit of labor is also presented, serving to undercut the notion that the early period of industrialization was based on a proliferation of new, machinery–intensive technologies.

The case for government involvement in the provision of elementary education in nineteenth-century England is assessed by presenting estimates of the rate of return to literacy. Before government involvement, the estimated rate of return to male literacy was considerably above the return on most alternative investments in the English economy. The differential narrowed with the onset of government involvement. The evidence is much weaker for any initial underinvestment in female literacy. The contribution to national income from correcting any initial underinvestment in literacy appears to have been modest.

This paper attributes the relative decline of the British economy in the twentieth century to rigidities in its economic and social institutions that had developed during the nineteenth-century era of relatively atomistic competition. Inherited and persistent constraints impeded British firms from acquiring the market control, authority in labor relations, or managerial hierarchy necessary to avail themselves fully of modern mass production methods. At the societal level there was an interrelated failure to transform the character of British educational and financial institutions, labor-management relations, and state policy in order to promote economic development. By performing better in these respects lateindustrializing countries were able to surpass Britain in economic growth.

In prosperous and depressed areas sectors of industry representing structural transformation in interwar Britain tended to draw upon new types of workers rather than upon workers displaced in declining export industries. Data on the age and sex composition of people in expanding and declining industries, on new entrants to the labor force, and on interindustry mobility are examined to support this claim. The process reflects a general tendency of capitalist economies to grow through incorporation of new elements.