Since the triumph of a business culture a century and half ago the businessman has been scorned, and so the phrase “bourgeois virtue” sounds like an oxymoron. Economists since Bentham have believed that anyway virtue is beside the point: what matters for explanation is Prudence. But this is false in many circumstances, even strictly economic circumstances. An economic history that insists on Prudence Alone is misspecified, and will produce biased coefficients. And it will not face candidly the central task of economic history, an apology for or a criticism of a bourgeois society.

In this article we use a unique source—a 30-year time series of the share transactions of two joint-stock companies—to examine the growth of the London capital market prior to and immediately after the Glorious Revolution. We argue that the London experience with open capital markets was not solely the result of 1689. Rather it was the learning by private individuals and goldsmith bankers which took place in the decades before 1689 that allowed the market to take full advantage of the property rights changes which occurred with the change in regimes.

Secondary-school enrollment and graduation rates increased spectacularly in much of the United States from 1910 to 1940; the advance was particularly rapid from 1920 to 1935 in the nonsouthern states. This increase was uniquely American; no other nation underwent an equivalent change for several decades. States that rapidly expanded their high school enrollments early in the period had greater wealth, more homogeneity of wealth, and less manufacturing activity than others. Factors prompting the expansion include the substantial returns to education early in the century and a responsive “state.” This work is based on a newly constructed state-level data set.

A sectoral analysis of comparative labor productivity levels over the period 1870 to 1990 suggests mechanisms of catching-up and forging ahead that are rather different from those found in the conventional literature. Both Germany and the United States caught up with and overtook Britain in terms of aggregate labor productivity largely by shifting resources out of agriculture and improving their relative productivity position in services rather than by improving their position in manufacturing. Although capital played some role, the changes in comparative labor productivity also reflected changes in comparative total factor productivity, related to technology and organization.

Black families included in the 1918/19 BLS Consumer Purchases Survey used installment credit more frequently and merchant credit less frequently than White families. Economic and demographic characteristics explain the racial difference for installment but not for merchant credit. I argue greater demand for installment credit by Black families was satisfied because repossession of collateral upon buyer default overcame merchants' personal prejudice with regard to creditworthiness, but absence of tangible collateral impacted the availability of merchant credit. Low use of merchant credit can account for relatively high interwar saving rates for low-income Black families.

This article investigates sex-specific mortality rates in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury rural Germany to determine whether there was any gender bias in the allocation of household resources. Family reconstitution data from 60 villages provide evidence of considerable excess female mortality among married adults. The empirical findings are consistent with a bargaining approach to understanding intrahousehold resource allocation and suggest that women's survival disadvantage is related to their positions in the remarriage market, the perceived value of their work, as well as differences in altruism. Agricultural change appears to be one factor responsible for the emergence of this disadvantage.

This article uses evidence from the manuscripts of the 1860 federal census to analyze the wealth of adult males in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Previous multivariate analyses of wealth from the census have been flawed by reliance on ordinary least squares; we instead use quantile regression. Immigrants fared considerably better in the Midwest than the East: immigrants in the midwestern cities held more wealth than their eastern counterparts, both absolutely and relative to the native-born in their respective cities. We explore the causes of these differences and their consequences for nineteenth-century Americans and their communities.

Focusing on a religious commune known as the Shakers and utilizing the information recorded in the enumeration schedules of the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture censuses, this article estimates the productivities of Shaker enterprises and compares them with those of other producers randomly selected from the same data source. The results provide support to the contention that communes need not always suffer from reduced productivity. Shaker farms and shops generally performed just as productively as their neighbors; when differences did exist between their productivities, there are good reasons to attribute them to factors other than the organizational form.