Research on nineteenth-century economic and social mobility has concentrated on occupational change among men who remained in the same community for ten or more years, although fewer than half of any community's residents persist that long. This article uses a data set created specifically to compare the experiences of men who migrated from Newburyport, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century with those of men who persisted. It finds that blue-collar migrants were more successful than were their counterparts who did not move. The results suggest that previous studies may have considerably underestimated the extent of economic opportunity in nineteenth-century America.

Chain migration was an important factor in European migrants' decisions in the nineteenth century. This article demonstrates that previous migrations have long-run effects and continue to impact the decisions of future migrants for many years. Chain migration produces not only more migration but different migrants. Migrants from over 1,300 different German villages are classified as networked and non-networked. The most definitive results from comparing the two types of migrants are the figures on cash assets because they support the model's prediction that socially networked migrants needed less cash than non-networked migrants to accomplish their migration goals.

Socioeconomic differences in birth weight have narrowed since 1900. The mother's nutritional status during her growing years, proxied by height, accounted for most of the differences in the past, but not today. Children born at the beginning of this century compared favorably to modem populations in terms of birth weights, but suffered high fetal and neonatal death rates. By day ten children in the past were at a disadvantage because best practice resulted in insufficient feeding. Improved obstetrical, medical, and nutritional knowledge has increased weight in the first days of life, which may account for increased adult stature.

This article examines one feature of the pre—Federal Reserve financial system that has not been widely researched: the market for bank drafts (the “domestic exchanges”). Though the exchanges existed for nearly a century, critics argued that exchange rate fluctuations exacerbated financial panics. We find, using cointegration analysis over the period from 1899 to 1908, that differences in growth rates across regions caused predictable movements in rates. We conclude that the exchanges promoted efficiency in the payments system. This supports the view that the private sector might have developed a unified national system had the Fed not abolished the exchanges.

The articles by Harrison and Allen that follow deal with a major episode in economic history, one that offers both rich empirical evidence and challenging theoretic problems. It is now possible to conduct an economic post mortem on seven turbulent decades in the experience of the very large economy that made up the Soviet Union, and these articles examine some key operational issues lying at the heart of that experience. Readers will find the best introduction to these issues in Paul Gregory's masterly monograph, Before Command. My task here is limited to identifying the context for the intellectual action on the stage.

Soviet planners developed the “unchanged prices of 1926/27” to facilitate the solution of an agency problem—the regulation of self-interested producers as they worked to fulfill plans for heterogeneous products denominated in rubles. The system limited but did not eliminate producers' opportunistic behavior, which took the form of inflating the plan prices of new products. Through the 1930s and 1940s the “unchanged” prices proved resistant to reform, and following their abolition in 1950 the system was soon afterwards reinstated with a new base year. The history of the “unchanged” prices illustrates the limits of command.

New estimates of the growth in total and per capita consumption are developed for the Soviet Union during the first three Five-Year Plans. These estimates show that consumption per head rose 27 percent from 1928 to 1937. The gains were confined to the urban population and to those moving from the countly to the city. In the standard interpretation, per capita consumption fell in the 1930s. The reasons for the difference in interpretation are examined in detail. The estimates presented here are based on new information and on alternative approaches to valuation and index number problems.

Differential treatment of men and women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor markets casts doubt on the common practice of adding male and female labor to create a single “labor” variable in the production function. This article shows that men and women must be disaggregated in the production function, and investigates the effects of inappropriate aggregation on the debate over the Habakkuk-Rothbarth labor scarcity hypothesis. With disaggregation, a female-using bias and an overall labor-using bias is found for the period 1850 through 1919. Technical change was male-neutral through 1900 and male-using thereafter.

This article examines the impact of what is undoubtedly the most important monetary regime change in U.S. history: the founding of the Federal Reserve System. We find, using a (G)ARCH model, a significant reduction in interest rate uncertainty following the founding of the Fed. Additionally, we show that the passage of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908, another significant change in policy, also led to a reduction in interest rate uncertainty. These results are robust to alternative interest rate models, as well as to incorporating the impact of other events important to financial markets in our sample.