This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

Governments often respond to crisis situations with radical economic policies. The Shipping Act of 1916 created a government-owned shipping company. This significant departure from prior policy arose in the atmosphere of crisis surrounding the war in Europe. The Wilson Administration was able to use political institutions to its advantage and ensure that alternative, more moderate proposals would not be considered by the legislature. Initially thwarted by a filibuster, the administration was forced to compromise in order to maintain party loyalty and pass the bill in 1916.

The role of culture in economic development is experiencing renewed interest among scholars. This study proposes high intercultural transactions costs as a reason for the enduring scarcity of modem capital and technology in poor countries and conducts a statistical test based on the premise that cultural diffusion reduces these costs. The stock of direct investment in poor countries at the end of the colonial era is shown, as predicted, to be directly correlated with the diffusion of Westem culture in the European empires and elsewhere.

Did macroconomic interventions make any contribution to Argentina's revovery from the Great Depression? Macroeconomic policy deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of convertibility in 1929. Fiscal policy was conservative. Monetary policy became unorthodox after 1931, when the Caja de conversión began rediscounting to sterilize gold outflows and avoid deflation. This change predated the creation of the central bank in 1935. A wider literature links the interwar depression in the core to flaws in the gold standard, and active monetary policy to escape from defaltion and slump; our work extends this idea to the periphery.

Production functions for sugar in four major sugar-producing zones in Cultivation- System Java (1840 through 1870) are estimated using colonial data. The estimates are analyzed for evidence of structural change in the years from 1848 to 1851. The results confirm that the colonial reforms of those years were accompanied by significant changes in sugar production: the results are also consistent with the thesis of “agricultural involution” in Java. There is strong evidence for technological change in sugar production, though these gains cannot be specifically attributed to either the agricultural or the industrial aspect of sugar production.

Conventional wisdom holds that output per capita in colonial British America increased between 0.3 and 0.6 percent per year. Our conjectural estimates challenge this view, suggesting instead that such growth was unlikely. We show that the most likely rate of economic growth was much lower, probably close to zero. We argue further that to understand the performance of the colonial economy it is necessary to include the economic activity of Native American Indians. When this is done, we estimate that the economy may have grown at the rate suggested by previous researchers.

The orthodox view of U.S. reconversion after World War II relies on unacceptable GDP figures for the wartime economy and misinterprets the low level of unemployment during the war. For the postwar transtition, the emphasis on consumer demand financed by drawing down liquid assets accumulated during the war is inconsistent with the facts. The success of the transition depended on the reestablishement of “regime certainty,” which in turn depended on diminishing the influence of the more zealous New Dealers. Wartime and postwar political development created sufficient regime certainty for the postwar market system to generate genuine prosperity.

For long periods, and in line with recent theoretical literature, the rabassa morta sharecropping contract successfully reduced problems of moral hazard and opportunistic behavior, and provided incentives for sharecroppers to respond to market opportunities. However, from the late nineteenth century, technical change, rising wages, and weak wine prices all increased the incentives for postcontractual opportunistic behavior on the part of the sharecropper, leading to conflicts and loss of trust between the principal and agent.

The wage book of a Derbyshire farm, which includes payments to laborers for 1772 to 1775 and 1831 to 1845, allows me to examine the employment patterns of male and female day-laborers at this farm before and after important innovations in agriculture. I find a fall in relative female employment which appears to be due to a fall in demand. Male employment shifted to the spring, but female employment maintained the same seasonal pattern. These seasonal and sexual shifts in the demand for labor probably resulted from the changes in animal husbandry that followed enclosure.

During the late nineteenth century, competition from cheap American grains undermined agricultural economies across Europe. This article investigates how similar forces of globalization in the production of Mediterranean fruits and nuts dampened economic prospects across southern Europe and in some cases contributed to outright economic and political crises.

This study examines the interplay between financial crises, uncertainty, and economic growth during the interwar period. Comparing the experiences of ten countries, we provide evidence that reductions in the credibility of a country's commitment to the gold standard generated capital flight and higher interest rate volatility. This volatility, in turn, was inversely correlated with economic growth. These results suggest that financial crises helped propagate the Great Depression, in part, by increasing uncertainty.

In Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, sugarcane was typically purchased by Japanese-owned sugar mills at prices guaranteed long in advance of delivery. In some places, the future price was indexed to the price of rice in the following year. This study points out that indexing served to insure farmers' real incomes. But as an insurance against an aggregate risk, this arrangement threatened the mill's profits. We investigate why mills nevertheless offered the insurance.

This article uses 1937 and 1940 Census data to estimate the effect that hiring an additional relief worker in a county had on unemployment statistics for that county. The fundamental estimation problem arises because one cannot easily control for economic conditions that influenced both the number of individuals holding relief jobs and the number counted as jobless.

Progressive-Era reformers claimed typhoid, a waterborne disease, was more prevalent in cities with private water companies than in cities with public water companies. This article tests this claim for the 1880 to 1920 period. The evidence suggests private companies invested in water filters more often than public companies, and that switching from private to public provision of water did little to improve typhoid rates.

The first domestic food to be regulated by the federal government in the United States, margarine had a unique regulation history. No other food products has been so harshly treated throughtout the world. The American margarine policy up to the 1950s is generally considered remarkably severe. The Canadian policy was even more stringent and more enduring. The province of Quebec, and until very recently of Ontario, still prohibits the yellow coloring of margarine. This article compares the history of margarine regulation in the two countries and uses the interest-group theory of government to investigate why it was so stringent.

I examine prenuptial contracting behavior in early-nineteenth-centuiy Quebec to explore property rights within families and the efficacy of marital property laws. Drawing on a transaction cost framework, I examine the decision to sign a contract and couples' property rights choices. I find, for example, that couples signing contracts tended to choose joint ownership of property when wives were particularly important to the household. These findings illustrate the potential effects of legal institutions on individuals' behavior (such as the importance of family labor, human capital acquisition, and even mating decisions) and the value of a flexible legal environment.

We examine the income of older men in London around 1930, based on a large sample. The income of nonworking older men was substantially below that of men still working. We find no evidence that retirement rates increased at the state-penionable—unsurprisingly, since pension paryments provided less than a povertyline income. Less demanding or part-time work was unavailable. Hence we conclude that the decision of older manual workers to leave the labor market was determined primarily by the absence of appropriate employment opportunities, rather than the presence of substantial assets or nonlabor income.

This article examines the role of dowries and highlights the variables that affected the size of dowries in fifteenth-century Tuscany. The estimation, which matches the households found in the marriage contrascts with the corresponding households in the Florentine Catasto of 1427, offers support for the present net value hypothesis and for the altruism model. Results indicate a positive correlation between a bride's dowry size and her age when used as peoxy for her contribution to the marital household. Parents also provided their daughters with larger dowries when they married “down” into relatively less wealthy or socially prominent households.

The Glass-Steagall Act may have increased the cost for corporations of raising external funds for investment spending. Significant differences are found in the way financial institutions influenced corporate investment spending. Investment regressions for a sample of companies affiliated to financial institutions are estimated and compared to those for a control sample. Prior to Glass-Steagall, affiliated companies do not display any sensitivity between investment spending and internal measures of liquidity, whereas the control sample does.

Research into sculture and entrepreneurship in Britain has been dominated by casual empiricism. This article shows the benefits of using a new method. Lifetime wealth accumulation is specified as a measure of entrepreneurial performance, and applied to data collected from dictionaries of business biography. Industry, region, and religious dissent are ruled out as explanations of entrepreneurial performance. Education and entrepreneurial type are the important predictors. Firm inheritors and those receiving a high-status education experienced relatively low lifetime rates of wealth accumulation. Firm founders, managers, and individuals with a lower-status education were comparatively successful.