New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

Around 1900, an extraordinary number of stillbirths appeared in Japan's statistical yearbooks. This article investigates possible biological explanations but concludes that Japan's anomalous stillbirth rates were primarily the result of the deliberate misreporting of infanticides and abortions. On the basis of an international comparison spanning five centuries, it estimates that between 1886 and 1940, Japanese parents filed between 1.7 and 2.8 million false stillbirth reports.

This article examines socioeconomic mobility across three generations in Sweden from 1815 and until 2011. Using longitudinal micro-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD), we examine the transmission of socio-economic status along three different dimensions; social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and earnings. We demonstrate an association between grandfathers' class or occupational status and the outcome of grandsons, when controlling for the association between fathers and sons. The associations remain stable over time and are stronger for paternal grandfathers than for maternal. For earnings, we find no grandparental association.

New water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eliminate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We examine how this affected human capital formation using early-life typhoid fatality rates to proxy for water quality. We merge city-level data to individuals linked between the 1900 and 1940 Censuses. Eliminating early-life exposure to typhoid fever increased later-life earnings by one percent and educational attainment by one month. Instrumenting for typhoid fever using typhoid rates from cities that lie upstream produces results nine times larger. The increase in earnings from eliminating typhoid fever more than offset the cost of elimination.

The U.S. home ownership rate rose by 10 percentage points between 1940 and 1945, despite severe restrictions on construction during World War II. I investigate whether wartime rent control played a role in this shift. The empirical test exploits variation in rent reductions across cities that had similar increases in rents prior to control. This variation does not appear to be correlated with underlying trends also driving home ownership. Greater initial rent reductions led to larger increases in home ownership; rent control can account for a significant share of the increase in home ownership over the early 1940s.

Public mass modern education was a major pillar of state-led development in the post-Colonial period. I examine the impact of Egypt's transformation in 1951–1953 of traditional elementary schools (kuttabs) into modern primary schools on the Christian-Muslim educational and occupational differentials, which were in favor of Christians. The reform granted kuttabs' graduates (where Muslim students were over-represented) access to higher stages of education that were previously confined to primary schools' graduates. Exploiting the variation in exposure to the reform across cohorts and districts of birth among males in 1986, I find that the reform benefited Muslims but not Christians.

This article explores the risks and returns to currency speculation during the 1920s and 1930s. We study the performance of two well-known technical trading strategies (carry and momentum) and compare them with that of a fundamentals-based trader: John Maynard Keynes. Technical strategies were highly profitable during the 1920s and even outperformed Keynes. In the 1930s, however, both technical strategies and Keynes performed relatively poorly. While our results reveal the existence of profitable opportunities for currency traders in the interwar years, they suggest that such profits were necessary compensation for enduring the substantial risks that all strategies entailed.

For almost 25 years between 1797 and 1821, the gold standard in Britain was suspended in order to finance the Napoleonic Wars, creating a paper pound or a fiat currency. Suspension was accompanied by substantial inflation and the accumulation of public debt. By identifying shifts in the spot exchange rate of paper pounds for gold, I document how contemporaries' expectations of how debt would be stabilized in the future shaped the pound's internal value. Thus, it is argued that during the “paper pound” period, fiscal prospects provided a third mechanism, beyond monetary and real factors, affecting the price level.

Do human capital endowments trump location for knowledge-intensive industries? This article takes advantage of a natural experiment created by the end of the Soviet planned economy in 1991, which had geographically distributed R&D manpower according to planned needs as opposed to a distribution determined by a market economy. It examines the extent to which the planned economy created a path-dependence in the location of post-Soviet human-capital intensive production. The study finds that regions with more R&D personnel in 1991 did better in the development of modern market-oriented knowledge-intensive business services, like engineering and IT. Several explanations are offered for this path-dependence, with an emphasis on human capital externalities being the most plausible.

This article investigates how, with increasing land pressure during Russian settlement in Kazakh steppes in the late nineteenth century, clan institutions affected the transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture. Using a novel dataset constructed from Russian colonial expedition materials matched with clan genealogies, we find that, controlling for geographic factors, clan identity strongly influenced the duration of transhumance period, the organization of production, and the acquisition of new agricultural tools. Information transmission within clans, external economies of scale in nomadic pastoralism, and clan-specific values and norms underlie the results.

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy.

The rollout of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the early twentieth century dramatically increased the frequency with which rural voters received information. This article examines the effect of RFD on voters' and Representatives' behavior using a panel dataset and instrumental variables. Communities receiving more routes spread their votes to more parties; there is no evidence it changed turnout. RFD shifted positions taken by Representatives in line with rural constituents, including increased support for pro-temperance and anti-immigration policies. These results appear only in counties with newspapers, supporting the hypothesis that information flows play a crucial role in the political process.

This article shows that there were timing, geographic, and sectoral anomalies in the 1937/38 recession, none of which are easily explained by aggregate shocks. I argue that an auto industry supply shock contributed both to the recession's anomalies and to its severity. Labor-strife-induced wage increases and an increase in raw material costs led auto manufacturers to raise prices in fall 1937. Expectations of these price increases brought auto sales forward. When auto prices finally rose, sales plummeted. This shock likely reduced 1938 auto sales by roughly 600,000 units and 1938 GDP growth by 0.5–1 percentage point.

Critics who doubt the sources and meaning of some four inches of catch-up growth claim that market-based distortions created by slave traders biased measured heights of children and adolescents. Here we analyze this possible bias using a new database of all slave manifests available at the National Archives. Employing procedures to match names of shippers with known or suspected professional traders, we find that biases in height by age due to trader selectivity were negligible relative to the four inches of catch-up growth.

Beginning in the 1880s, southern states introduced pensions for Confederate veterans and widows. They expanded these programs through the 1920s, while states outside the region were introducing cash transfer programs for workers, poor mothers, and the elderly. Using pension application records and county-level electoral data, we argue that political considerations guided the distribution of these pensions. We show that Confederate pension programs were funded during years in which Democratic gubernatorial candidates were threatened at the ballot box. Moreover, we show that pensions were disbursed to counties in which these candidates had lost ground to candidates from alternative parties.

The discussion of the rationalization wave in German industry (1924–1929) still lacks proper industry-level estimates of the rate of technological progress. To close part of this gap, this article investigates total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hard coal mining over the extended period 1913–1938. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is applied to a sample of firms from the Ruhr coal district. TFP grew positively overall and specifically from 1924–1929. Surprisingly, however, TFP growth was even faster from 1933–1938, suggesting that the Nazi economy heavily capitalized on the Weimar rationalization movement, the effects of which are usually not traced beyond 1932.

This article reassesses the causes of Chicago state bank failures during the Great Depression by tracking the evolution of their balance sheets in the 1920s. I find that all banks suffered tremendous deposit withdrawals; however banks that failed earlier in the 1930s had invested more in mortgages in the 1920s. The main problem with mortgages was their lack of liquidity, not their quality. Banks heavily engaged in mortgages did not have enough liquid assets to face the withdrawals, and failed. This article thus reasserts the importance of pre-crisis liquidity risk management in preventing bank failures.

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders differs from that of Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger (1992). Using a sample of inward coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, we show that Steckel and Ziebarth made errors classifying shippers, that they underestimate the relative number of slaves shipped by traders, and that their empirical estimates of selection bias are attenuated towards zero.

The papyri of Roman Egypt provide some of the most important quantifiable data from a first-millennium economy. This paper builds a new dataset of wheat prices, land prices, rents, and wages over the entire period of Roman control in Egypt. Movements in both nominal and real prices over these centuries suggest periods of intensive and extensive economic growth as well as contraction. Across a timeframe that covers several severe mortality shocks, demographic changes appear to be an important, but by no means the only, force behind changes in factor prices.