This study provides an empirical test of North and Weingast's theory of British capital-market development after the Glorious Revolution. The evidence is consistent with the hypotheses that institutional innovation in the 1690s led to the dramatic growth in London capital markets, and that threats to these institutions caused financial turmoil. We also find the economic motivation for these innovations to be consistent with the work of Ekelund and Tollison.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the inflationary exeriences of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, applying theories about money and government budget constraints in the manner of Thomas Sargent and François Velde. The comparison looks beyond economic policy itself to the political and social consequences of the two inflationary crises. The parallel is fairly close: close enough to suggest that Russia, despite its recent quiescence, may not have seen the end of its monetary—or political—travails.

I use retrospective work histories from a unique dataset to follow workers in six cities through occupational, industrial, and geographic moves, thereby characterizing aspects of black economic mobility during the 1940s that cannot be viewed through the Census data. Relatively few migrants were drawn directly from the southern agricultural sector. Black occupational upgrades were larger than white upgrades on average but black upgrades were smaller than those of observationally similar whites.

Was clearinghouse membership a key factor mitigating withdrawls from intermediaries during the Panic of 1907? Analyzing balnace-sheet information on institutions in New York and Chicago, we find ecidence that clearinghouse memebers had institutions in New York and Chicago, we find evidence that clearinghouse members had smaller contractions in demand deposits than did nonmembers. New York City trusts, isolated from the clearinghouse, were subject to heightened perceptions of risk, and suffered large-scale withdrawals because they were outside of the clearinghouse and therefore much less prepared to withstand large-scale depositor runs. We suggest that this aspect of the Panic of 1907 helped to forge support for the creation of a U.S. central bank.

We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample of individuals (from the 1915 Iowa State Census). The returns to a year of high school or college were substantial in 1915—about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young males. Education enabled individuals to enter lucrative white-collar jobs, but sizable educational wage differentials also existed within occupational groups. Returns were substantial even for those in farming. We find, using U.S. census data, that returns to education decreased between 1915 and 1940 and again during the 1940s.

We investigate the effect of the establishment of modern institutions on the risk premium associated with Japanese government bonds traded in London between 1870 and 1914. While most institutional innovations failed to elicit an immediate market response, the adoption of the gold standard did significantly reduce the perceived risk associated with Japanese bonds. In addition, some geopolitical events, especially the military victory over Russia, improved Japan's debt capacity.

I examine the evolution of conflict and cooperation during economic growth by analyzing civil disputes in New South Wales between 1860 and 1900. Disputes per capita fell over time and the proportion of cases settled before trial increased, but patterns varied across locations and types of disputes. Economic conflicts were likelier to be settled than personal disputes, and the fraction of cases settled was significantly lower in frontier areas and in districts without access to transportation. The results suggest that increased market exchange facilitates the development of informal rules and encourages transactors to find cooperative solutions through private bargaining.

This article illustrates the impact of Jewish lenders on private credit markets and public finance in medieval and Renaissance Italian towns. In Tuscan private credit markets, Jewish lending helped households to smooth consumption, buy working capital, and provide dowries for daughters. Jewish lenders also helped the public fmances of the communes in which they resided. This article shows that public-finance considerations affected the choice of the interest-rate ceiling Jews were allowed to charge. In many instances, the communes raised the interest-rate ceiling for Jewish lenders in order to tax or borrow the proceeds.

Historical events are reflected in asset prices. We analyze movements in the price of bonds issued by five European governments and traded on the Swiss bourse between 1928 and 1948, with special attention to the war years. Some war events that are generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices. This holds, in particular, for the official outbreak of the war and changes in national sovereignty. But other events to which historians attach great importance are not reflected in bond prices, most prominently Germany's capitulation in 1945.

In this article I develop a taxonomy of financial practices based on whether financial activity is intended to fund new capital investment or to create new financial structures to accommodate planned changes in the structure of an industry's existing capital stock. The taxonomy is then applied to the financial development of the U.S. sugar-refining industry between 1875 and 1905. The taxonomy provides an explanation of the rise of the large, widely held industrial corporation in the United States that is more consistent with the historical record than are the conventional “financial strain” or “asset liquidation” hypotheses.

This study examines technical change, trade, economic structure, and growth during the British Industrial Revolution by means of computational general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. It rejects Peter Temin's contention that our “new view” of sectorally concentrated productivity growth is inconsistent with industrial export data. A CGE trade model with diminishing returns in agriculture and realistic assumptions about consumer demand shows that while technical change in cottons and iron were major spurs to exportation of those specific goods, the need for food imports also stimulated exports generally. Incorporating trade data thus enriches our “new view.”

This article examines the Confederate cotton bonds floated in Europe in March 1863 and traded on the London market. Over a 27 March 1863 to 17 June 1865 sample we isolate two, nonreversed, “turning points” that follow news of Confederate defeat at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863 and the fall of Atlanta in September 1864.

What were the living standards of American slaves? According to Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their monumental study, Time on the Cross, the material standard of living of slaves compared favorably with that of other nineteenth-century agricultural laborers. More recently, utilizing anthropometric data that allow them to construct ageheight profiles for slaves, economic historians have cast doubts upon this view as it applies to particular age cohorts. They question the validity of the earlier assessment of living standards as it applies to slave newborns, infants, and children.