In the early nineteenth century, the Suffolk Bank established a regional banknote clearing network. Despite the benefits offered, many of the system's member banks were unhappy with it and quickly affiliated with an alternative clearing network as soon as it appeared. The reason for the quick abandonment of the Suffolk system was that it failed to price its network clearing services efficiently. Pressured by large Boston banks to shift the costs of the system to small country banks, the Suffolk engaged in inefficient cross-subsidization. Once a competitor emerged that priced efficiently, it drove the Suffolk from the market.

We examine the extent and correlates of part-year manufacturing during the late nineteenth century using unpublished data from the manuscripts of the 1870 and 1880 censuses of manufactures. These are the earliest comprehensive estimates available on this topic. Although the typical manufacturing plant operated full-time, part-year operation was not uncommon. Indeed, the likelihood of part-year operation varied across industries and location and with plant characteristics, and workers in such plants received higher monthly wages than those in firms that operated year-round, compensating them for the loss of work and possible inconvenience.

This article links the terms of trade, money supply, labor market, and money and credit markets to explore a puzzle in Malayan economic history: why, despite rapid growth and high per capita income, did pre–World War II Malaya industrialize so little? A range of data is drawn together to show how for Malayan manufacturers economic boom was accompanied by precipitate deterioration in the real exchange rate, while in a slump credit contracted sharply and with it the size of the Malayan market for manufactures. Analysis of Malayan experience may be relevant for understanding slight industrialization elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

This study documents the boom in Europe's imports from Asia and the Americas between 1500 and 1800 and explores its causes. There was no commodity-price convergence between continents, suggesting that declining trade barriers were not the cause of the boom. Thus, it must have been caused by some combination of European import demand and foreign export supply. The behavior of the relative price of foreign importables in European cities should tell us which mattered most and when: we provide the evidence and offer a model which is used to decompose the sources of Europe's overseas trade boom.

When Soviet central planners began to mechanize the cotton harvest in earnest in 1958, they expected more rapid diffusion than the market-driven process that had begun in the United States a decade earlier. But despite high output of cotton-picking machines, the share of the crop harvested mechanically grew more slowly than in the United States. The factor proportions in Central Asia did not justify mechanization: although planners could enforce introduction of the new technology, investment in cotton-harvesting machines was largely a waste of resources. The costs of premature introduction are estimated at over $1 billion in 1960s prices.

A number of hypotheses attempt to disentangle the “true” causes of the Panic of 1837 from domestic and international factors that came into play as the crisis approached. I analyze U.S. government documents and contemporary newspapers to reconsider the role of domestic factors. These sources place neither the official distribution of the federal surplus nor an international shock at the center. Rather, a series of interbank transfers of government balances and a policy-induced increase in the demand for coin in the Western states drained the largest New York City banks of their specie reserves and rendered the panic inevitable.

This study estimates the size of the so-called “informal,” or unintermediated, credit market in one Swedish city through a period of economic transformation. In the early 1840s promissory notes accounted for more than half of the total credit market, and almost four times the value of credit channeled through the banking system. Even in the 1870s, the promissory-note market was twice the size of the loan volume of the banking system. By 1905 bank-based credit had finally surpassed the informal variety; but even then, outstanding promissory notes were almost three-fifths as great as total bank credits to noncorporate borrowers.

Housing was a major item of English consumer expenditure. Yet little is known of its average quality or rental cost. I estimate average rents, constant-quality rents, and housing quality from 1550 to 1909. Constant-quality rents rose substantially relative to other costs of living during the Industrial Revolution. This probably explains why, despite rising real wages, housing quality appears to have declined from 1760 to 1860. There were, however, substantial quality gains in the eighteenth century prior to the Industrial Revolution. The implications of these new series for measurement of growth during the Industrial Revolution are briefly explored.

Between 1890 and 1930, the development of refrigerated rail transportation enabled a national U.S. apple industry to emerge. Apples were shipped over long distances, and sold in the terminal market on consignment or FOB, or in the auction market. There were frequent disputes over quality, caused by the long distances between buyers and sellers, the natural decline in apple quality over time, and because farmer and railroad moral hazard could accelerate quality deterioration. By 1930, apple transactions relied on government quality standards and inspection services. Evidence suggests that these institutions emerged in response to contract-enforcement and quality problems.

Using recently collected examination data from a sample of Texas state-chartered banks over the period 1919–1926, the role of moral hazard in increasing ex-ante asset risk is explored. Analyzing individual bank-level data, we find that the existence of deposit insurance for state-chartered banks increased their likelihood of failure. Increases in loan concentrations followed declines in capitalization at insured state banks. However, we find no statistically significant relationship between loan concentrations and capitalization at uninsured national banks or at state banks before the introduction of deposit insurance. These results show a moral-hazard effect at work.

ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION: REGISTRATION REMINDER

EHA RESEARCH GRANT AWARDS FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS

CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS: ECONOMIC HISTORY SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The labor-force participation rate (LFPR, hereafter) of older males in the United States has fallen dramatically over the last 120 years.For the discussions of the long-term trend of the labor force participation rate of older males prior to 1940, see Durand, Labor Force; Long, Labor Force; Ransom and Sutch, “Labor” and “Trend”; Moen, Essays and “Labor”; Margo “Labor Force Participation”; Carter and Sutch, “Fixing the Facts”; and Lee, “Long-Term Unemployment.” In 1880 nearly four out of five men 65 and older were gainfully employed. Today, only 15 percent of males at those ages participate in the labor market. Such a sharp decline in the labor market activity of older men has been regarded as one of the most marked changes in the U.S. labor market that the twentieth century witnessed. In addition to the secular rise in retirement, the sharp increase in the share of the aged population has made this retirement behavior a major social issue in the post–World War II era. Many economists have attributed this phenomenon to the implementation and expansion of social insurance programs, especially Social Security.See Boskin, “Social Security”; Parsons, “Decline” and “Male Retirement Behavior”; Hurd and Boskin, “Effect”; and Gruber and Wise, Social Security. See Krueger and Pischke, “Effect”; and Lee “Rise” for some evidence against this argument. However, about half of the fall in the LFPR of older men took place prior to 1940, when the public programs for old-age security were not as yet well developed. Though a number of factors have been suggested, including rising retirement incomes and a changing industrial environment, it is not entirely clear what caused the exit of older workers from the work force during this period.Costa, Evolution.

Recently, a speaker addressing a group of academics unfamiliar with the literature on medieval economic history referred to Bruce Campbell as a “godlike figure” in the field. The characterization was based upon a career's work that Campbell has invested in the study of medieval English agriculture. Heretofore this work has appeared in a very large number of articles and a clutch of edited books. Now, however, Campbell has produced his first monograph on the subject—in effect, his equivalent to the Ten Commandments.

Those unfamiliar with the earlier volume in this series, on “sources for the economic and social history of the Middle Ages” (of western Europe), all edited by the distinguished French historian Robert-Henri Bautier and the archivist Janine Sornay, will find this title confusing. The first tome, published in three subsidiary volumes (so far) from 1968, provides the archival sources for the economic and social history of the medieval French principalities of Comtet-Venaissin, Dauphiné, and the estates of the house of Savoy. The second and current tomes concerns the archival sources for the economic history of the southern and northern domains of the French ducal house of Burgundy; it too is being presented in a series of fascicules. To date, the editors have published just two parts of the first volume, whose overall title is Les archives centrales de l'État bourguignon (1384–1500): archives des principautés territoriales. Adding to the confusion, their first publica-tion in this series, presented in 1984, was also vol. I, part 2: Les principautés du Nord. It covered some (not all) of the Burgundian principalities in the Low Countries: the county of Flanders (and its seigneurie of Malines, within Brabant); the county of Artois (along with the “villes de Somme,” now all part of France); the duchy of Brabant; the duchy of Limburg and the adjacent lands known as the “terres d'Outre-Meuse”; the county of Hainaut (now also part of modern France); and the duchy of Luxembourg (with the county of Chiny). That choice therefore had a certain commendable logic, since this region commands a far greater importance in the economic history of medieval Europe than do the southern principalities, even though the latter provided the foundations for the Burgundian realm.

A decade has passed since I surveyed the first 50 years of the Journal of Economic History.Whaples, “Quantitative History.” This note picks up that story by documenting changes in the “supply” of economic history since 1990—the topics of the JOURNAL'S articles, who has had articles published in its pages, and how rankings of economic-history programs are reflected by recent publications. In addition, I use data on articles published in the JOURNAL to examine the “demand” for economic history—which articles have been cited the most often and what types of articles are most likely to be cited.

The dual-editor regime, which has governed the operations of the JOURNAL for so long, assumed the form of a San Francisco Bay axis last year, as Gavin Wright at Stanford joined Jan de Vries at Berkeley to guide the JOURNAL's affairs. Now the time is approaching to pass the baton of the Rest of the World editorship. At the end of June Jan de Vries and assistant editor Heath Pearson will return to civilian life and send their files and the burdens of editorship to C. Knick Harley of Western Ontario University.