Research in Economic History – serie

"Volume 18 of Research in Economic History" contains six contributions, evenly divided between British and U.S. topics. The first discusses the use of the Charity Commission Reports as a new source for the study of British economic history. These data challenge received wisdom on crowding out during the Napoleonic Wars, the contributions of enclosures to agricultural productivity, and the role of the Glorious Revolution in establishing secure property rights. The second study revisits the more than century old debate about whether nineteenth century industrialization in Britain worsened or improved conditions for child labour. Data from the Parliamentary Papers and the censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1871 confirm high labour force participation rates for older (but not younger) children, particularly in textiles. The third paper investigates the impact of fluctuations in the weather on agricultural output in Britain, and consequently on the level of GDP. Remaining on agricultural topics, but shifting venue to the United States, the fourth essay explores the induced innovation hypothesis using state data. The authors question many of the stylized facts which have been adduced in support of the hypothesis at the national level, and argue that state level investigations permit greater sensitivity to the substantial geophysical and factor price variation within the boundaries of the United States. The fifth paper examines the role of the National Banking System in reducing exchange rate variations (deviations from par) within the United States. The final contribution considers the impact of the introduction of two parallel but completely separate telegraph systems on the operation of U.S. financial markets.

"Research in Economic History".

In the tradition of the new economic history, this collection includes seven carefully researched papers blending systematic empirical research with consideration of broader theoretical and analytical issues.

Volume 21 of "Research in Economic History" is a substantial contribution in several respects. Its heft reflects the continuing increase in quality submissions to this series, which invites (although it does not require) authors to take advantage of less stringent space limitations than is typically true in a journal article. The papers offer regional diversity: two papers with principal focus on England, one on Germany, one on Australia, and three on the United States. There are some commonalities in themes: we have three papers on 1931, three papers that have something to do with banks, two on urban economic history, and two on wage stickiness, albeit in different countries and addressing labor markets several centuries apart. What can be said of all of these inquiries, however, is that each involves the careful consideration of quantitative and qualitative data within a well articulated theoretical framework. And in almost every case, we have original analysis of primary source material. It's a pleasure in this volume to publish work of scholars at all stages of their careers. We have contributions ranging from those of recently minted Ph.Ds to those of distinguished senior scholars. Each of these articles is written with care, polish, and often passion. Academic disciplines flourish - and economic history is no exception - when scholars immerse themselves in their subjects and combine this with commitments to logic and evidence, detail, and clarity of exposition. The consequences are the fascinating papers and great scholarship evident here. We look forward to continuing to publish innovative, well written and carefully considered contributions to economic history, providing a niche which complements outlets such as the "Journal of Economic History", "Explorations in Economic History", and the "Economic History Review". Potential contributors are urged to contact the editor for information on submission requirements.

Volume 22 of "Research in Economic History" contains six papers. Three are on agriculture and two on macro issues related to the Great Depression. A concluding paper examines trends in interstate migration in the United States. Fred Pryor begins the volume with a provocative exploration of the degree to which the Neolithic revolution was in fact revolutionary. Pryor argues for a considerably lesser break with the past than has been commonly asserted. He maintains, in particular, that hunter-gatherer methods of procuring subsistence persisted alongside a continuum of agricultural practices. His evidence is drawn largely from records of surviving hunter-gatherer societies. Moving forward 10 millennia, Gregory Clark provides details of his construction of an annual price series for English net agricultural output from 1209 to 1914. Clark incorporates fresh archival material with existing published series, using consistent methods to build and aggregate 26 component series. In the third paper on farming, Giovanni Federico estimates world agricultural production from 1800 to 1938. He concludes that output grew more rapidly than population, and did so on all continents, although more rapidly in countries of Western settlement and in Eastern Europe than in Asia or in Western Europe. Federico also finds that output grew faster before World War One than in the inter-war years, and resulted over time in an increase in the share of livestock products. Continuing into the twentieth century, we have two papers on the Great Depression. First, Barry Eichengreen and Kris Mitchener explore the degree to which the seeds of economic downturn were sown during the 1920s, particularly through "excessive" credit creation. The authors develop quantitative measures of credit expansion and ask how well these indicators account for "uneveness" in the twenties expansion as well as the depth and severity of the depression in individual countries. They complement this macro analysis with sectoral studies of real estate, consumer durables, and high-tech sectors. Jakob Madsen's contribution is also based on an examination of depression macro history in a number of countries, but his focus is on output and labor rather than credit markets. He explores the perennial questions of how sticky were wages and prices and whether such stickiness played a significant casual role in the rise of unemployment. Contrary to many models that assume or assert that prices are inherently more flexible than nominal wages, Madsen finds the reverse: prices adjusted slowly to changes in nominal wages, and this stickiness played a role in propagating economic depression. Finally, Josh Rosenbloom and Bill Sundstrom explore changing rates of interstate migration by examining individual-level data from population censuses available in the "Integrated Public Use Microdata Series" (IPUMS). Their central finding is that propensities to migrate within the United States have traced out a U-shaped pattern, tending to fall between 1850 and 1900 and then, during the twentieth century, rising until around 1970.

This volume of "Research in Economic History" includes eight papers. Five were submitted through regular channels and three papers which were solicited at the conference Toward a Global History of Prices and Wages. Following is Nonnenmachers study of the early years of the telegraph industry in the United States. The third paper is Herranz-Loncans estimates of the growth of the Spanish infrastructure between 1844 and 1935. Then there are two papers based on microeconomic data. The first is the investigation by James, Palumbo and Thomas of late nineteenth century saving among working class families in the United States. The second is Murrays study of the operation of pioneering sickness insurance schemes in several European countries between 1895 and 1908. Finally, the three papers from the conference. In the first of these papers, Pamuk studies trends in urban construction workers wages in the Eastern Mediterranean over almost a millennium. The following paper by Bassino and Ma examines wages of Japanese unskilled workers between 1741 and 1913. In the final paper, Ward and Devereux present estimates of the relative income of the United Kingdom in comparison with that of the United States for 1831, 1839, 1849, 1859 and 1869.

This volume includes seven papers in quantitative economic history. Four were accepted through our regular channels. These include Harald Edquist and Magnus Henrekson on "Technological Breakthroughs and Productivity Growth", Scott Redenius on "New National Bank Loan Rate Estimates, 1887-1975", Ebru Guven Solakoglu on the "Net Effect of Railroads on Stature in the Post Bellum Economy", and Pedro Lains on "Growth in a Protected Environment, Portugal, 1850-1950". Three papers are from a 2004 conference, Towards a Global History of Prices and Wages. These include Metin Cosgel on "Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire", Johan Soderberg on "Grain Prices in Cairo and Europe in the Middle Ages", and Jun Seong Ho and James Lewis on "Wages, Rents, and Interest Rates in Southern Korea, 1700 to 1900".

The volume includes six papers in quantitative economic history. Peter Mancall, Josh Rosenbloom, and Tom Weiss consider growth in colonial North America, while Gary Richardson examines the role of bank failures in propagating the Great Depression. John Komlos examines the heights of rich and poor youth in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Klas Fregert and Roger Gustafson provide a synoptic view of public finances in Sweden from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Drew Keeling studies the economics of the steamship industry that facilitated migration between Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1914. Finally, Gregg Huff and Giovanni Caggiano examine the integration of labor markets in Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It includes original articles written by experts on the subjects and articles supported by quantitative data.

Volume 28 contains articles on the economic history of Europe and the U.S. including "Air Conditioning, Migration and Climate-related Wage and Rent Differentials" by Jeff E. Biddle; "The Rail-Guided Vehicles Industry in Italy, 1861-1913: the Burden of the Evidence" by Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea; "English Banking and Payments before 1826" by John A. James; "Retail Trade by Federal Reserve District, 1919 to 1939: A Statistical History" by Haelim Park and Gary Richardson; and, "The Great Fortunes of the Gilded Age and the Crisis of 1893" by Hugh Rockoff.

Volume 29 contains articles on the economic history of Europe and the U.S. including "Understanding Aging During the Epidemiologic Transition" by Suchit Arora; "Estimating French Regional Income: Departmental Per Capita Gross Value Added, 1872-1911" by Paul Caruana-Galizia; "Improve and Sit. The Surrendering of Land at Rents Below Marginal Product in Nineteenth-Century Valencia, Spain" by Samuel Garrido; "Passage of the Married Women's Property Acts and Earnings Acts in the United States: 1850-1920 by R. Richard Geddes and Sharon Tennyson; "New State-level Estimates of Personal Income in the United States, 1880-1910" by Alexander Klein; and "Exports from the Colonies and States of the Middle Atlantic Region" by Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom and Thomas Weiss

Volume 30 contains articles on the economic history of Europe and the U.S. including "Democratization and Central Government Spending, 1870-1938: Emergence of the Leviathan?" by Jari Eloranta, Svetlozar Andreev and Pavel Osinsky; "Swedish Regional GDP 1855-2000," by Kerstin Enflo, Martin Henning and Lennart Schon; "Did the Fed Help to Form a More Perfect Monetary Union?" by John A. James and David F. Weiman; "The Anthropometric History of Native Americans, 1820-1890" by John Komlos and Leonard Carlson; and "The dispersion of customs tariffs in France between 1850 and 1913: discrimination in trade policy," by Becuwe Stephane and Blancheton Bertrand.

Volume 31 of Research in Economic History (REHI) is forthcoming in April 2015. REHI is a peer-reviewed book series published once a year. We cover all areas of economic history, including demography and development. Research in Economic History is a well-established and well-cited journal which has presented work by leading researchers in the field of economic history, including economists, historians and demographers.

Volume 32 of Research in Economic History (REHI) is forthcoming in April 2016. REHI is a peer-reviewed series published once a year. We cover all areas of economic history, including demography and development. Research in Economic History is a well-established and well-cited journal which has presented work by leading researchers in the field of economic history, including economists, historians and demographers.

Volume 33 contains articles on the economic history of Europe, America and Asia and brings new analysis, and newly created datasets to address issues of interest. Two papers focus on the US and contribute to our understanding of the Great Depression. In "Reexamining the Origins of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act", Beaudreau argues industrialists used the plight of farmers to raise tariffs on manufactured goods. And Jalil and Rua show in "Inflation Expectations in the U.S. in Fall 1933” that shifts in inflationary expectations could be responsible for the patterns in output witnessed in 1933: an expansion in the early part of the year which stalled by the Fall. Two papers present new data. "First Cabin Fares from New York to the British Isles, 1826-1914" by Dupont, Keeling and Weiss extends their work on understanding early tourism by creating a new series to examine the time path of first class travel over the 19th century. "Reforms and Supervisory Organizations: Lessons from the History of the Istanbul Bourse, 1873–1883" by Hanedar, Hanedar, Torun and Çelikay data newly collected from the Istanbul Bourse to better understand how investors respond to different types of reforms. And finally, Field in "The Savings and Loan Insolvencies and the Costs of Financial Crisis" gives a reinterpretation of the Savings and Loan Crises of the late 1980s and early 1990s in light of the subsequent, much more severe crisis of 2007/08.

Volume 34 contains articles on the economic history of Europe, North America and South America and brings new analysis, and newly created datasets to address issues of interest. Two of the papers present newly constructed datasets. In "Prices, Wages and the Cost of Living in Old Republic São Paulo: 1891-1930", Ball presents a newly constructed real wage index. São Paulo was the main destination for immigrants to Brazil in this period, but there has never before been sufficient data to analyse why. In "Multiple Core Regions: Regional Inequality in Switzerland, 1860 to 2008", Stohr uses the wealth of available Swiss data on agriculture and employment to create GDP measures for subregions in Switzerland. He uses these data to argue that aggregate inequality in Switzerland was low in the initial push to industrialization because there were multiple, similar centers industrializing simultaneously, thus mitigating inequality across regions. Two of the papers gather together existing data so that it can be analysed for the first time in a consistent manner. In "The forgotten half of finance: working-class saving in late nineteenth-century New Jersey", Bodenhorn uses previously unexplored consumer surveys to characterize the savings behavior of the working class. And in "Heights across the last 2000 years in England", Galofré-Vilà, Hinde, and Guntupalli gather all existing skeletal data for England for 2000 years to create a consistent longitudinal height series. They compare the series to height series of other regions as well as other measures of well being in England. And finally, in "Monetary Policy and the Copper Price Bust: A Reassessment of the Causes of the 1907 Panic", Rogers and Payne dig into the details of copper prices to discover the link between the Bank of England’s contractionary monetary policy and changes in real asset prices. Their findings have important implications for understanding the mechanisms of monetary policy.

In this new volume of Research in Economic History, editors Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott bring together a cast of expert contributors to vigorously interrogate and analyze historic economics questions.  The volume looks across a range of issues. Two papers address the political economy of the US: one explores how editorials in Business Week encouraged the acceptance of Keynesian policies among US business elites; and one quantifies the role of economics in the political support of William Jennings Bryan. Two papers bring new insight into longstanding debates, looking at the “antebellum puzzle” and why medieval peasants had scattered fields. Finally, two papers explore topics in European history, including the effect of deflation on the distribution of income in Denmark, 1930-1935, and the influence of shareholders on policy at the Banque de France.For researchers and students of economic history, this volume pulls together the latest research on a variety of unanswered questions.

In this 37th volume of Research in Economic History, editors Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott assemble a group of lead experts to showcase new historical data, analyses of historical questions, and an investigation of historians’ networks.The volume covers a wide range of ideas, beginning with an examination of the sharp decline in school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War, followed by a study on the fiscal administration of an experimental parliamentary subsidy on English knight’s fees and income from 1431. A third paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830-1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility decline.The volume then pivots to deal with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the 13th century through the establishment of money changers. Finally, the volume summarizes in detail the content of Pieter Stadnitski’s revolutionary 1787 report An Explanatory Message Concerning the Funds, analyzing its arguments with the context of Dutch archival materials including deeds, newspaper reports, and letters, as well as congressional records from American sources.This new volume presents fascinating new areas of enquiry and analysis for all scholars in the field of economic history, including economists, historians and demographers.

In this new volume of Research in Economic History, editors Shawn Kantor and Carl T. Kitchens bring together a diverse range of expert contributors to vigorously interrogate and analyse historic economics questions. This includes examinations of inequality from North and South America, as well as Europe, in terms of health, land, and wealth. For researchers and students of economic history, this volume pulls together the latest research on a variety of unanswered questions from the 1860s until the present day.

In this 36th volume of Research in Economic History, editors Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott assemble a cohort of experts to present new historical data, analyses of historical questions, and an investigation of historians' networks.The volume covers a range of ideas, beginning with a look in to new data from the sources of Swiss comparative advantage in the time of the first globalization, and of funding for investments in Russian human capital from the late imperial period to the present. A third paper turns to a newly-created database of articles published in major economic history journals from 1980-2018, demonstrating the breadth of scholars' networks and the types of questions they asked. Then, the volume pivots to North American economic development. Looking at deflators when estimating Canadian economic growth between 1870-1900, a new, more complete price index for Canada is presented which should alter scholars' views on the contributions of the country to the North Atlantic economy. Another paper expands the literature on the unusual US system of state and local banks in the early 20th century. Finally, the volume presents new estimates on the number and value of slaves entering the US during the Antebellum period.

Volume 26 of "Research in Economic History" includes six papers, evenly divided between European and North American topics. On the European side, Stefano Fenoaltea and Carlo Ciccarelli provide new regional estimates of social overhead investment in Italy. Markus Lampe reports data on bilateral trade flows in Europe between 1857 and 1875. And Bernard Harris surveys the literature on gender, wealth, and health in England and Wales since industrialization. Turning west, Mark Kanazawa studies conflicts between ranchers and miners over who should bear the burden of taxation in nineteenth century California. Jason Taylor and Peter Klein examine Depression era cartel behavior under the National Industrial Recovery Act. Finally, James Butkiewicz mines archival material to provide a new perspective on and some rehabilitation of Eugene Meyer's role as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board between 1930 and 1933.