Economists frequently hypothesize that industrialization contributed to the United States’ nineteenth-century fertility decline. I exploit the circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1881 and 1900 to show that the establishment of textile mills coincided with a 6–10 percent fertility reduction. Migrating households are responsible for most of the observed decline. Higher rates of textile employment and child mortality for migrants can explain part of the result, and I conjecture that an increase in child-raising costs induced by the separation of migrant households from their extended families may explain the remaining gap in migrant-native fertility.

How do property rights evolve when unoccupied areas attract economic use? Who are the first claimants on the frontier and how do they establish their property rights? When do governments provide de jure property rights? We present a conceptual framework that addresses these questions and apply it to the frontiers of Australia, the United States, and Brazil. Our framework stresses the crucial role of politics as frontiers develop by identifying situations where the competition for land by those with de facto rights and those with de jure rights leads to violence or potential conflicts.

England's post-Reformation demographic regime has been characterized as “low pressure.” Yet the evidence hitherto for the presence of a preventive check, defined as the short-run response of marriage and births to variations in living standards, is rather weak. New evidence in this article strengthens the case for the preventive check in both medieval and early modern England. We invoke manorial data to argue the case for a preventive check on marriages in the Middle Ages. Our analysis of the post-1540 period, based on parish-level rather than aggregate data, finds evidence for a preventive check on marriages and births.

We study the seventeenth-century market for figurative paintings in Italy analyzing original contracts between patrons and artists. We show that a number of supply and demand factors affected prices. We find a positive and concave relation between prices and size of paintings reflecting economies of scale. We show evidence of a positive relationship between prices and the number of figures depicted. Trade in paintings was sufficient to equalize prices between different destinations. Finally, we provide support for the Galenson hypothesis of a positive relation between age of experimental artists and quality as priced by the market.

The onset of the Great Depression did not spark a surge in personal bankruptcy. For debtors in default, state garnishment law played a significant role in the decision to file for bankruptcy. Only states that made it easy to garnish a debtor's wages experienced significant increases in bankruptcy as a consequence of the Depression.

We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was not sufficient for their success. The Danish legal system, which we compare to that of other countries, was also of crucial importance, along with the way in which rules were monitored and enforced. Of particular interest is the Danish cooperatives’ use of contracts, which we explore with evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources.

Motion pictures constituted a revolutionary new technology that transformed entertainment—a rival, labor-intensive service—into a non-rival commodity. Combining growth accounting with a new output concept shows productivity growth in entertainment surpassed that in any manufacturing industry between 1900 and 1938. Productivity growth in personal services was not stagnant by definition, as current understanding has it, but instead was unparalleled in some cases. Motion pictures’ contribution to aggregate GDP and TFP growth was much smaller than that of general purpose technologies steam, railways, and electricity, but not insignificant. An observer might have noted that “motion pictures are everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

“So long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on the last.”1

Alfred Marshall

This article analyzes the effects of parliamentary representation on road infrastructure expenditure during the Spanish Restoration. Using a panel data set of Spanish provinces in 1880–1914, we find that the allocation of administrative resources among provinces depended both on the delegation characteristics (such as the share of MPs with party leadership positions, and their degree of electoral independence), and the regime's global search for stability. These results point to the importance of electoral dynamics within semi-democratic political systems, and offer an example of the influence of government tactics on infrastructure allocation.

We examine the economic consequences of an 1886 reform in Massachusetts that mandated the weekly payment of wages. We derive conditions on key elasticities of labor supply that determine the qualitative effects of the reform on workers’ effective wages and utility. We match census and administrative data on workers in a Lowell textile mill for a period encompassing the switch from monthly to weekly payment. Empirical estimates of a labor supply equation imply that the reform increased workers’ effective wage rates and welfare. The reform also decreased the mill workers’ average wage, as predicted by the theory of compensating differentials.

Executive pay fell during the 1940s, marking the last notable decrease in the past 70 years. We study this decline using a new panel data set on the remuneration of top executives in 246 firms. Government regulation—including explicit salary restrictions and taxation—had, at best, a modest effect on executive pay. By contrast, a decline in the returns to firm size and an increase in the power of labor unions contributed greatly to the reduction in executive compensation relative to other workers’ earnings from 1940 to 1946. The continued decrease in relative executive pay remains largely unexplained.

We examine the strategies interwar working-class British households used to “smooth” consumption over time and guard against negative contingencies such as illness, unemployment, and death. Newly discovered returns from the U.K. Ministry of Labour's 1937/38 Household Expenditure Survey are used to fully categorize expenditure smoothing via nineteen credit/savings vehicles. We find that households made extensive use of expenditure-smoothing devices. Families' reliance on expenditure-smoothing is shown to be inversely related to household income, while households also used these mechanisms more intensively during expenditure crisis phases of the family life cycle, especially the years immediately after new household formation.