Bernanke suggested that the source of credit-channel effects lies in the longevity of credit disruptions. The investigate how the duration of credit-channel effects influenced macro-economic activity during the Great Depression, we employ the amortized stock of deposits in closed banks, which contains information about the time it takes to rehabilitate insolvent debtors or liquidate their collateral. As found by Bernanke and others, vector autoregression models provide evidence that changes in prices explained the largest proportion of fluctuations in industrial output. In our model the stock of closed national banks' deposits was as important as the money stock in terms of explaining output changes. Consistent with recent theoretical work on the financial system and economic growth, our new credit proxy provides evidence that the dynamic effects of credit disruptions were cumulative and pervasive during the Depression.

Deregulation of banking in the United States during the past two decades is beginning to make American banking resemble that of other advanced countries. Banks are now free to operate nationwide branch systems, to combine commercial banking with investment banking and securities brokerage, and to offer insurance and other products previously restricted or prohibited. A generation ago banks could do none of these things. In this meaty collection of six essays (three with co-authors) previously published in different places during the 1990s, Charles Calomiris asks and provides answers to a number of questions concerning U.S. banking history and bank regulation. How and why did American banking become so uniquely different from banking in other countries? Why was the U.S. banking system more prone than those of other countries to banking panics and other types of financial disturbance? What were the effects of these differences on financial and economic efficiency? Why did a banking system so greatly regulated for more than a century by state and federal authorities become so greatly deregulated at the end of the twentieth century? Will there be still more deregulation as a new century begins? In the years ahead, how competitive will U.S. banks be in the increasingly global financial markets?

With this important collection of essays on the independent economic activities of slaves, freedmen, and indentured Indians in colonial Mauritius, Richard Allen takes the history of Mauritian labor well beyond the familiar themes of exploitation and resistance. This is careful economic history from below, with important implications for Mauritian social and cultural history. Allen's argument is that inhabitants of the vast bottoms of the social pyramid—gens de couleur (free persons of color), ex-apprentices, and Indian immigrants—not only shaped their own destinies in difficult legal and social conditions, but that their independent choices profoundly influenced the insular economy as a whole. Through attention to subalterns' acquisition and management of land and capital, Allen sheds new light on key questions in Mauritian social history (especially the social “disappearance” of the Afro-Mauritian population and the rise of Indian entrepreneurship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). As do all provocative and well-researched works, this one proposes solutions to old problems and allows us to ask new questions about the roles of Malagasy, Africans, Indians, and their descendants in Mauritian history.

Modern historians emphasize that Indians in colonial Mexico were victims of Spanish oppression, but not merely victims. The native peoples turned the institutions and culture of the conquerors to their own needs, and in so doing they mitigated the burdens of colonialism. Economic historians have been slow to take up the challenge of understanding these adaptations, in part because the history is alien and its sources difficult, and in part because the assumptions of neoclassical economics ill-describe a world that was scarcely modern, if modern at all. But if any work has risen to the challenge, it is this one.

Movies might appropriately be the defining genre for the twentieth century. There were no movies before the twentieth century. Knowing what movies were made and seen by whom over time, and which messages and symbols were conveyed tells us a great deal about the American Century and about how people saw capitalists and capitalism. We argue that American movie culture evolved at a time when the debate about wealth and poverty and structural change was transforming the economy, and when most people could not explain or understand the revolutionary changes underway. We also suggest that who made the movies and how they made them mattered: a majority of the early movies were made by immigrant groups, such as Jews, and that mattered to how the movies perceived the outsiders and the insiders and how they portrayed capitalism and capitalists.

Since the middle of the 1980s George Borjas has made significant contributions to our understanding of the economics of immigration to the United States. This book synthesizes those contributions, makes them accessible to an audience of nonspecialists, and is likely to shape the debate over the nation's future immigration policy. Borjas explicitly ties his previous work on the changing skill composition of immigrants, the costs and benefits of immigration, and the long-run patterns of immigration assimilation to specific recommendations for lawmakers. He finds that the changing mix of source countries since the 1960s has led to the arrival of less-skilled immigrants who have adversely impacted less-skilled native workers, that the net benefits of immigration are small, and that the disadvantages suffered by immigrants last through several generations of their offspring. He advocates a “point” system that would admit a larger fraction of more highly-skilled workers, and a reduction in the overall number of immigrants to 500,000 per year, 33 percent fewer than were admitted in the 1980s and 1990s.

Studies of the social and economic history of the Amazon are few and far between, and long-term studies that attempt to link the history of the colonial and post-colonial periods are especially unusual. The demands of academic careers make it difficult for many scholars to undertake the time-consuming research required to produce a book covering such long time spans in a serious way, especially since the “long” nineteenth century saw three different political regimes in Brazil: colonial, imperial, and republican. Moreover, the isolation of the Amazon, the conditions of its archives and documentary collections, and its lack of a well-developed historiography further complicate efforts to study this vast region. Thus, Robin L. Anderson has undertaken an especially difficult task writing a book on the settlement of the Amazon from 1758 to 1911.

James McCann is the author of one of the most important agricultural and environmental histories of an African region (People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). As such he is well placed to attempt a modern environmental history of the African continent. Overall, he has been successful. Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land is an extremely useful survey of recent trends in research into the causes and consequences of environmental change in Africa. As an introduction to the subject, McCann's book is probably unrivaled.

This paper is an effort to build on the essays collected in our three NBER conference volumes by offering a new synthesis of American business history. We move beyond the traditional markets versus hierarchies (or markets versus central planning) dichotomy and argue that one can observe in the cross-section of the economy at any moment in time a variety of coordination mechanisms in use, man of which do not fit neatly into these ideal types. We argue further that one can speak of the incidence of these different mechanisms in cross-section, and hence one can speak of modal mechanisms and hence of the history (that is, evolution) of these cross-sections. Finally, we argue that changes over time in the incidence of these coordination mechanisms were propelled by forces that can be taken as exogenous including, most importantly, improvements in transportation and communications, urbanization, and the general rise in per capita income.

Like the rest of the Middle East, the economic history of Palestine in the early twentieth century has traditionally been the domain of social and political historians. The complexity and controversy surrounding the era of the British Mandate (1919–1948) ought to deter any serious economic historian from contemplating a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of economic life. After all, this was the period when the Zionist goal to create a Jewish national home in Palestine came into direct conflict with the native Arab community, and stretched the flexibility of a British administration that had committed itself to promoting the Zionist project while protecting the native population. Fortunately, Jacob Metzer has assumed the difficult task of producing an economically sophisticated study of the origins and the evolution of this divided economy while circumventing the political pitfalls associated with Mandatory Palestine.

Forty years after it was first published, Celso Furtado's seminal The Economic Growth of Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), is still one of the most widely used books in undergraduate, and even graduate courses, on Brazilian economic history. Although short, Furtado's book set forth many hypotheses that generated several memorable academic debates amongst specialists in Brazilian history. Even when Furtado was wrong on a given topic, his analysis often stimulated discussions that pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge. Such is the case with the scholarly literature arising in the 1970s and 1980s around the development of the region of Minas Gerais after the abrupt end of the mining boom in 1760. Furtado's view, that the end of mining activity had brought a generalized economic decadence to the region, was widely accepted. It was believed that this collapse had caused a reversion to subsistence activities, together with dispersal of the population and underutilization of slaves, leading eventually to their emigration to other regions where coffee was becoming the center of the economy.

This volume contributes to a large literature on job stability and job security by offering a set of closely related papers that attempt to measure recent trends in the United States. Most earlier literature found little change in job stability and job security during the 1980s, seeming to contradict public and media perceptions of a sharp decline in both. The present volume traces its origins to a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in fall 1996, at which conflicting evidence on trends in the early 1990s was presented. A follow-up conference sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation encouraged the authors to update their findings through the mid-1990s and to reconcile differences across data sets and methodologies. After review by anonymous referees, 12 papers were collected in this volume. All of them are written by distinguished authors who have contributed previously to this literature.

In the United States the density of economic activity in cities differed significantly over time. Between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cities became increasingly dense; however, since the second half of the twentieth century, the trend has reversed as cities have become dispersed. The density of economic activities differed significantly across cities as well. At any given point in time, there is a great variation in the density of economic activities across cities. The dynamic changes in the spatial organization of economic activities also differed across cities. In some cities, such as New York, population density grew and plateaued while in others, such as St. Louis, it grew and fell dramatically. Yet, despite the fact that the defining element of a city is its density, few scholars have systematically examined the long-run changes in the spatial organization of economic activities. This paper documents the historical changes in the density of economic activities and explores the causes of their rise and decline.

This volume appears during the commemoration of the centennial of the landmark discovery of oil near Beaumont, Texas. The consequential volume of production, a sequence of nearby finds, and the creation of Gulf and Texaco from Spindletop antecedents all make the event noteworthy even after the original site has subsided into a swamp.

Historians of China agree that the Chinese economy underwent a period of dramatic growth—some call it a commercial revolution—between AD 600 and 1400. As is so often the case, they have located all the causes within China: improved strains of rice, new technologies of water control, and the expansion of the market system. This book challenges the received wisdom by highlighting an important, but neglected, dimension of these economic changes: the effects of foreign trade on the city of Ch'üan-chou (also spelled Quanzhou).

Since the revolution of 1979 there has opened a great gap in scholarship on the economic history of premodern Iran. As the author of the present study has appropriately noted, over the past two decades the historiography of premodern Iran has suffered from ideological constraints (on Iranian scholars) as well as lack of access to local sources for western scholars. In light of these limitations, the present study on the political economy of silk trade in Safavid Iran is a refreshing reminder that not all is lost in an otherwise hopeless situation. Using predominantly western (including Russian) archival sources, the author has made a significant contribution to the histories of western European (and particularly Dutch maritime) trade with Iran, of Safavid commerce, and of the politics of the Middle Eastern silk trade.

This paper investigates the dynamics of rapid frontier development in the 40 years of Barbados' history before 1680, the decades of its transition to sugar island and slave-based “plantocracy” from a settler economy peopled by white servants and numerous small land-owners. It uses a linked data set of several thousand individuals who appeared over time in three key data sources: the 1665 export registration, the 1679 census holdings of property, and the record of deeds. Combining these sources into career histories of thousands of the people who lived in Barbados during its sugar revolution make it possible to answer some of the most intriguing questions about that economic transition. In particular, these new data shed light on the land-consolidating activities of individual landowners over time, the role of small planters and artisans in the process of land clearing and agricultural capital formation, and the participation of merchants and foreign investors in creating sugar enterprises.

This interesting study fits into the growing literature of community studies that seek to expand our knowledge of the Civil War beyond the battlefield and the lives of generals. It looks at that conflict in an understudied region, Western North Carolina, which local myth holds was a Unionist stronghold. As in most local lore, there is a grain of truth but more than an ounce of outright inaccuracy. John Inscoe has explored the role of slavery in Western North Carolina (WNC) in a very fine previous book, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). He and his coauthor continue the debunking of local legend here in this finely nuanced study of the communities of the mountain regions of North Carolina.

Professor Woody Holton makes two important points in this fine study of rebellion: the elite gentlemen of Virginia did not always lead the Revolution, but were sometimes pushed from below, and the Chesapeake is not New England. Those of us who live and teach below the Mason-Dixon Line are often painfully aware that the general outlines of U.S. history are not the history of our region. As this detailed study of Virginia's path to Revolution makes clear, many of the generalizations about the origins of the American Revolution only hold for the northern colonies. But this work's greatest contribution is its carefully researched and documented argument that race and class mattered in creating a Revolution.

This book marks an important addition to the literature on banks and capital markets in the economic development of Latin America. In the field of Brazilian economic history, it will take its place on a short shelf of basic reference works that engage their subject in a systematic fashion. What makes the book especially ambitious is its attempt to link financial markets and banking institutions to the development of the Brazilian state and economy. Triner argues that the rise of modern banking in Brazil was accompanied by economic growth, market integration, and political arbitrage based on credit and monetary policies underwritten by banks. She argues, moreover, that Brazil's banking system developed simultaneously along public and private lines; that in many ways, banks provided an institutional linkage between public and private spheres; and that the state sought to use the banking system to consolidate and expand its influence.