The pioneering work of Lance Davis on regional bank loan rates in the United States from 1870 to 1914 generated several attempts to explain the observed regional interest rate differentials and their subsequent narrowing by 1914. This article reports on a more direct test of the hypothesis that barriers to capital mobility were due to monopoly power on the part of local bankers. Tests using data on individual banks and local markets for one state, Wisconsin, suggest that local competitive conditions did not exert a significant influence on bank lending performance. This may be the result of relatively free entry into Wisconsin banking during the period.

From the 1830s on Syria and Palestine exported monetary metal to pay for an import surplus. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a concomitant inflationary process. The apparent contradiction is resolved by a theoretical argument and by reference to the dual nature of the Ottoman monetary system. Government-induced inflation in terms of the domestic (token and paper) money reinforced the rising price of full-bodied coins, caused by the adverse balance of trade.

In 1747 the colony of Maryland enacted a law to improve the general quality of tobacco exports. Tobacco prices rose significantly after the law went into effect, while total tobacco exports continued to increase. The widespread use of tobacco as money, coupled with the exchange of inspection notes for tobacco at inspection sites, led to changes in the Maryland money supply due to the law. Transaction costs fell as a result of marketing all Maryland tobacco through inspection warehouses. The law also appears to have accelerated the trend toward diversification of the economy.

During the course of U.S. economic development, the institutions used to organize agricultural labor have undergone interesting and sometimes puzzling transformations. The transitions from wage contracting to tenancy observed in the post-bellum South and in nineteenth-century Iowa have been studied extensively.2 This paper evaluates the relatively neglected transition from wage labor to tenancy that occurred in the California fruit orchards during the period 1900–1910.3 Before 1903 Chinese and Japanese orchard workers were organized via the padrone system of wage labor, but in an abrupt series of events there ensued a shift into tenancy so dramatic that by 1909 contemporary observers noted that virtually all orchards were under tenant control. The fact that the new tenants were recent Japanese immigrants prompted investigations by the Immigration Commission as well as other agencies so that this particular shift into tenancy is documented in greater detail than those occurring in the South and in Iowa.

This article briefly discusses the operations of the British Exchange Equalization Account, 1932–1939, on the basis of the Treasury records of the time and in the light of modern views on exchange management. Its conclusion is that although the float may not have been “clean,” the intervention was probably justified by domestic objectives and the state of international capital markets.

The banking panic of 1930 has special significance for assessing the causal role of money during the Great Depression. A detailed examination of the panic-induced bank closings in November reveals that poor loans and investments in the 1920s was the principal factor contributing to the accelerated rate of bank suspensions. These findings are consistent with the. Friedman-Schwartz interpretation of the 1930 banking panic as a purely autonomous disturbance largely unrelated to the decline in economic activity. It is inconsistent with Peter Temin's conjecture that declining prices of lower-grade corporate bonds and the agricultural situation played an important causal role.

Britain's acquisiton of Lagos has already attracted considerable historical research, but it is examined here from a new perspective and with the help of unused sources. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the episode itself is reinterpreted to give prominence to changing property rights as both a cause and a consequence of annexation. Second, it is argued that the Lagos case can be placed in a broader framework of imperial expansion in which institutional change formed the centerpiece of a nineteenth-century development drive. Third, it is suggested that the study of African history might benefit from assigning higher priority to the analysis of property rights other than those embodied in slave-holding.

This multiple regression study of male and female wages in the clothing and textile industries finds that the standardized pay gap has changed against women from 1910 to 1970. The cross-section study of wages in 1909-1910 finds a very small residual in favor of men; but when the English-speaking variable is interpreted as screening many able women (but not men) from manufacturing, the residual shifts to one slightly favoring women. The cross-section study of pay in substantially the same industry group during 1969 finds very substantial residuals in favor of men after standardizing earnings. Hypotheses suggested for explaining these contrary findings include a decline in women's investment in human capital relative to that of men, and changing government and union tax and benefit patterns that discriminate against female investment in human capital.

This note contrasts the familial origins of 136 Jewish American entrepreneurs with those of 187 American non-Jewish entrepreneurs described in a previous study of mine. Information on both groups was drawn from published biographies. In addition, manuscript biographies were used to gather information on Jewish entrepreneurs.

In recent work, W. W. Rostow and W. A. Lewis have forcefully argued that real, not monetary, forces explain major periods of inflation and deflation in both the United States and Great Britain from 1797 to 1914. For them, changes in relative growth rates of agricultural and industrial output induce changes in the relative prices of major commodities and in the overall price level. A test of the substitutability of wheat for other primary products, 1870–1914, does not support the Rostow-Lewis theory.

The discovery of vast oil fields in Texas after 1901 encouraged competition in an industry previously dominated by Standard Oil of New Jersey. The manner in which the state of Texas enforced its antitrust and corporation laws hastened the growth of several major new oil companies, most notably Gulf Oil and The Texas Company, by constraining the activities of Standard in the new fields. In so doing, these Texas laws shaped the transition from near monopoly to near oligopoly in the oil industry. Such beneficial results of state laws were, however, largely accidental, since weaknesses in the government's capacity to monitor changes in the burgeoning industry undermined its ability to define and implement systematic regulatory policies. Problems of adjustment that accompanied government's early efforts to regulate market structure in oil have continued to hamper subsequent efforts to regulate other aspects of the industry's operations.

Popular wisdom asserts, and life-cycle theories of human capital investment seem to imply, that older scientists are slower to accept new theories than are younger scientists. When this view is tested with evidence on the acceptance of cliometrics, however, the year-of-birth variable, although statistically significant, explains less than 10 percent of the variance in acceptance.

This study examines the Florentine economy and women's role in it from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The changes that took place in the Florentine economy as it adapted to new economic opportunities undermine the notion of economic decline and suggest instead considerable resilience. The changes that took place helped to produce and were themselves the product of the growing participation of women in the economy.