We construct datasets of linked census records to study internal migrants' selection and destination choices during the first decades of the “Great Migration” (1910–1930). We study both whites and blacks and intra- and inter-regional migration. While there is some evidence of positive selection, the degree of selection was small and participation in migration was widespread. Differences in background, including initial location, cannot account for racial differences in destination choices. Blacks and whites were similarly responsive to pre-existing migrant stocks from their home state, but black men were more deterred by distance, attracted to manufacturing, and responsive to labor demand.

This article reconstructs the history of mutual assistance among Federal Reserve Banks. We present data on accommodation operations through which Reserve Banks mutualized gold reserves in emergency situations between 1913 and 1960. Reserve sharing was important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Such cooperation was essential for the cohesion of the U.S. monetary union. But fortunes could change, with emergency recipients of gold becoming providers. Because imbalances did not endlessly grow, instead narrowing when region-specific shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

Although politics has a huge effect on economic outcomes, we still know too little about what public goods states furnish or what determines the laws, regulations, and policies that states adopt. Worse yet, we do not really understand how states arise in the first place and how they gain the ability to tax. There are numerous unanswered questions here that economic historians can profitably work on, and their research will be particularly valuable if they model the politics, gather data on taxation and spending by local and central governments, and pay serious attention to the historical details and to political behavior that may not involve optimization.

To assess competing theories of democratization, we analyze British sovereign bond market responses to the 1832, 1867, and 1884 Reform Acts, and to two failed Chartist agitations for reform. Analyses of high-frequency 3 percent consol yield data and historical financial press suggest three conclusions. First, democratic reform episodes were preceded by increases in perceived political risk, comparable to democratizing episodes in other countries. Second, both democratic reform and repression were followed by yield declines. Third, the source of political risk in Britain was both social unrest and political deadlock. Together, the findings challenge the “Whig” characterization of British democratization as exceptionally risk-free.

Recent research indicates the joint stock form was not a superior type of business organization in many countries historically. In Japan, however, its role was more pervasive. From 1896 to 1939 joint stock enterprises accounted for 44 percent of registered businesses and 80 percent of total capital. From 1922 to 1939 these enterprises outperformed other forms and generated 94 percent of aggregate profits. External finance factors, Japan's development phase, industrial structure, public policy, and culture led to high joint stock usage. The private limited liability company, introduced in 1938, did not displace the joint stock form.

Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This article introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first one-half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.

The impact of protection on economic growth has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection as the ratio of custom revenues to import value, which biases results if demand for imports is not perfectly inelastic. In this article, we show that the measure of protection matters. We estimate the James Anderson and Peter Neary (2005) Trade Restrictiveness Index for Italy from unification to the Great Depression. We suggest a different interpretation of some key moments of Italian trade policy and we show that the aggregate welfare losses were small in the long run and mostly related to protection on sugar in the 1880s and 1890s. We document that using different measures of protection affects results of the causal relation between trade policy on economic growth in Italy and in the United States. Accordingly, we argue that a systematic re-estimating of protection in the economic history of trade policy is needed.

This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship captains considered these differences when electing where to land enslaved Africans. Our dataset also shows that credit terms were highly erratic, especially in the last quarter of the century, contributing to both surges and collapses in the slave trade to individual colonies, and in the trade as a whole. Four such instances are examined in detail to show that instability in credit terms played an important and hitherto unacknowledged role in the volume and direction of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade in the second one-half of the eighteenth century.

This article assesses how the government of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) negotiated sovereign loans. Mexico was a serial defaulter that established a good reputation and issued bonds abroad at progressively better conditions. Based on new archival material, the article demonstrates that borrowing terms improved not only because of sounder fundamentals, but also due to the efforts of high officials to negotiate with debt underwriters. The Mexicans never accepted a patron bank and used the offers from American banks to bargain with European competitors. They acted according to the government's reputation, the underwriters' status, and the ideology of the Porfirian state.

In 1805–1882, Egypt embarked on one of the earliest state industrialization programs. Using a new data source, the Egyptian nineteenth-century population censuses, I examine the impact of the program on the long-standing inter-religious human capital differentials, which were in favor of Christians. I find that there were inter-religious differentials in reaping the benefits (or losses) of industrialization. The first state industrialization wave was “de-skilling” among Muslims but “up-skilling” among Christians, while the second wave was “up-skilling” for both groups. I interpret the results within Lawrence F. Katz and Robert A. Margo (2013) framework of technical change.

We revisit the story of technology adoption and diffusion in Japan's Meiji-era cotton spinning industry, the study of which was pioneered by Gary Saxonhouse (1974). Using a novel data set and modern methodology, we argue that both the ease with which the best technology diffused and the role of “slavish imitation” in this process may have been overstated. We find an important role played by market competition, including asset reallocation. Our analyses provide richer insights into the complex phenomena of technology diffusion, innovation, and economic growth.

Over time, international trade expanded beyond the reach of an individual's personal networks. How was long-distance trade among strangers financed without using banks? I argue that the joint liability rule enabled the medieval bill of exchange to become a major form of payment and credit in the early modern period which in turn supported an unparalleled expansion of trade. This article empirically examines the role that joint liability played in ameliorating fundamental information problems in long-distance trade finance.

This article provides a picture of economic inequality in northwestern Italy (Piedmont), 1300–1800. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and none has as long a timescale. The new data proposed illuminate little-known aspects of wealth distribution and general economic inequality in preindustrial times, supporting the idea that during the Early Modern period, inequality grew everywhere, independently from whether the economy was growing or stagnating. This challenges earlier views that explained inequality growth as the consequence of economic development. The importance of demographic processes is underlined, and the impact of the Black Death and other mortality crises is analyzed.

In the eighteenth century, European embassies in the Ottoman Empire started selling exemption licenses called berats, which granted non-Muslim Ottomans tax exemptions and the option to use European law. I construct a novel price panel for British and French licenses based on primary sources. The evidence reveals that prices were significantly high and varied across countries. Agents acquired multiple berats to enhance their legal options, which they exploited through strategic court switching. By the early 1800s, berat holders had driven other groups from European-Ottoman trade.

This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260–1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death “golden age” and so offer little support for a “girl-powered” economic breakthrough; and second that during the industrial revolution, women who were unable to work long hours lost ground relative to men and to women who could work full-time and fell increasingly adrift from any “High Wage Economy.”

We use newly compiled evidence on inter- and intra-continental shipping costs to investigate the relationship between transportation and trade for trans-Atlantic iron markets from 1870–1913. Although we find a surprisingly weak connection linking ocean freight rates to British exports, after controlling for endogeneity and measuring all costs associated with inter-continental pig iron shipments and the intra-continental assembly of raw materials, the importance of transportation strongly asserts itself. The cost to transport pig iron across the Atlantic, and the cost to transport iron ore and coking coal within North America, were important determinants of the volume of British exports.

This article explores the development of market integration within the Baltic Sea region and with England, from the 1840s to the late 1880s. It exploits two new datasets on grain prices. The degree of market integration is estimated using a wavelet variant of dynamic factor analysis that takes account of both time and distance. Additionally, we use the London corn market as the benchmark for the degree of market integration. Our results show that the role of distance disappeared in the wheat and rye, but not in the oats and barley trade, as the Baltic Sea Region became integrated into the Atlantic economy.

To estimate the impact of federal spending on state incomes, we develop an annual panel data set between 1930 and 1940. Using panel methods we estimate that an added dollar of federal spending in the state increased state per capita income by between 40 and 96 cents. The point estimates for nonfarm grants are higher and for AAA farm grants are much smaller and negative in some cases. The spending led to increase in durable good spending on automobiles but had no positive effects on private employment.

Automobile manufacture is generally regarded as the paradigmatic mass production industry, with large plants able to exploit scale economies. We argue that the radio industry also sheds important light on evolving production technology and determinants of competitive success in inter-war manufacturing. Timothy F. Bresnahan and Daniel M.G. Raff (1991) showed that productivity differences resulting from scale in the auto industry translated into differences in exit rates during the Depression. We find that technical scale economies did not play a large role in the radio industry. Instead selection during the Depression was on non-“technical” productivity factors, including whether or not a plant's parent company owned a brand.

To what extent do rising income levels explain the decline in adult mortality rates experienced in the United States a century ago? I explore this question by investigating the income effect of the country's first wide-scale entitlement program: the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted pensions to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from patronage politics to estimate the semi-elasticity of disease onset with respect to pensions. Income effects are large for cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory illnesses.