Ron Michener takes issue with my approach to and analysis of colonial Virginia's paper money. He objects to how I calculate the paper money's asset present value when the paper money is hypothesized to be zero-coupon and interest-bearing bonds. He questions my data on the amount of Virginia's paper money in circulation, and he objects to the econometric treatment I apply to my model of that money's performance. He, however, presents no alternative data constructions, or any alternative explanations for the patterns in the data, nor does he present any alternative hypotheses or do any hypothesis testing to account for the level and movement in the value of Virginia's paper money.

The quantity theory of money is applied to the paper money regimes of seven of the nine British North American colonies south of New England. Individual colonies, and regional groupings of contiguous colonies treated as one monetary unit, are tested. Little to no statistical relationship, and little to no magnitude of influence, between the quantities of paper money in circulation and prices are found. The quantity theory of money does not explain the value and performance of colonial paper monies well. This is a general and widespread result, and not a rare and isolated phenomenon.

Colonial Virginia's legislature introduced an inside paper money into its domestic economy that was, at that time, primarily a barter economy without any government or bank-issued inside paper monies in circulation. I decompose Virginia's paper money into its expected real-asset present value, risk discount and transaction premium. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts occurred in years when monetary troubles were suspected, namely worries that the government would not redeem the paper money as promised. Counterfeiting, however, was not one of these worries. The legislature had the tools and used them effectively to mitigate the effects of counterfeiting on the value of its paper money. Colonial Virginia's paper money was not a fiat currency, but a barter asset, with just enough transaction premium to make it the preferred medium of exchange for local transactions. It functioned like a zero-coupon bond and traded below face value due to time-discounting, not depreciation.

I decompose the market value of Colonial New Jersey's paper money into its component parts, namely its real-asset present value and transaction premium. Its market value was predominately determined by its real-asset present value. I also find a small transaction premium that is positively associated with the quantity of paper money in circulation and with the land-bank method of paper money injection. This paper money was not a fiat currency. It traded below face value due to time-discounting not depreciation.

I reconstitute the spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 from primary sources using forensic accounting techniques. I identify and analyze the methods for raising revenue to meet normal peacetime and emergency wartime expenses. I calculate the provincial tax burdens imposed on New Jersey's citizens. I identify how Britain interfered with New Jersey's fiscal structure. I estimate what the revenues and tax burdens would have been without this interference. New Jersey paid for war expenses by issuing bills of credit, spreading the tax burden of redeeming these bills into the future. New Jersey paid its yearly administrative costs with current property taxes and with current interest earnings from loaning paper money. In the absence of British interference and wars, New Jersey could have driven tax burdens to zero by using interest earnings to pay for all its provincial administrative costs.

Why are some forms of bound labour more coercive than others? Specifically, why was European indentured servitude in America more coercive than craft apprenticeship or life-cycle servitude-in-husbandry, despite the close similarity and derivative nature of these institutions? Concepts recently advanced in labour economics offer some preliminary answers to these questions. This investigation is exploratory in nature and focuses on three types of voluntary long-term labour contracts. However, the arguments and conclusions presented here may have wider applications and be useful for future research on other forms of bound labour which involve consent and contract.

The U.S. Constitution removed real and monetary trade barriers between the states. By contrast, these states when they were British colonies exercised considerable real and monetary sovereignty over their borders. Purchasing power parity is used to measure how much economic integration between the states was gained in the decades after the Constitution's adoption compared with what existed among the same locations during the late colonial period. Using this measure, the short-run effect of the Constitution on economic integration was minimal. This may have been because the Constitution did not eliminate all the institutional barriers to interstate trade before 1812.

The monetary powers embedded in the US Constitution were revolutionary and led to a watershed transformation in the nation's monetary structure. They included determining what monies could be legal tender, who could emit fiat paper money, and who could incorporate banks. How the debate at the 1787 constitutional convention over these powers evolved and led the founding fathers to the specific powers adopted is presented and deconstructed. Why they took this path rather than replicate the successful colonial system and why they codified such powers into supreme law rather than leaving them to legislative debate and enactment are addressed.

Convicts account for at least one-quarter of British migration to mid-eighteenth-century America. Their transportation to and disposal in America was essentially an experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice. A model of this trade is developed that yields testable implications regarding the relative distributional moments of convict auction prices, the size of shipper profits, and how convicts were selected for transportation.

Europeans stopped using servitude to finance passage to America sometime in the early nineteenth century, but exactly when and why immigrant servitude disappeared is a mystery. Hypotheses abound, but no consensus has emerged nor have scholars tested hypotheses. In this study, quantitative evidence for the final sixty years of immigrant servitude establishes when and why it disappeared. Servitude did not end because of insufficient demand, legal restrictions, or declines in passage fares. It ended because superior methods of financing migration developed. Chance historical events, however, determined the exact timing of the end.