Search

A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum working age legislation was twice as effective in reducing under-aged employment if children had been born with a birth registration law, with positive implications for school attendance. There is some evidence that registration laws also improved the enforcement of schooling laws for younger children. A retrospective analysis with the 1960 census shows that the long-term effect of registration laws was to increase educational attainment by approximately 0.1 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research has been conducted on the concept of jobless recoveries and their potential causes, primarily focused on the United States from the 1990s. This paper finds that the prolonged employment downturn following the brief 1980–1981 recession in Britain qualifies as a jobless recovery and then investigates possible contributing factors: labor reallocation across industries, regional employment changes, and job polarization. The United States, which did not have a jobless recovery from the early 1980s recession, is taken as a comparison case. I find that the leading candidate explanation for this jobless recovery is the reallocation of labor across industries. This suggests an important role for structural change in the early 1980s recession and in jobless recoveries more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assembles heating fuel prices for the U.S. state of Vermont, from the colonial era to the present, in order to test whether energy fuel prices and energy service prices have diverged over this time period. Prior authors have reported evidence of a significant difference between long run energy fuel prices and energy service prices. However, this is the first analysis to pose this question beginning in the context of colonial America. In accord with earlier work focused in the U.K. the paper reports a significant divergence in fuel and service prices. In this setting real heating fuel prices increased over the 220 year time period by a factor of between 15 and 20. In contrast, heating service prices increased by a factor of two. Expressed in labor units, heating service prices have fallen in Vermont by 25%, while fuel prices were essentially flat. Finally, over this two century time period in Vermont and the U.K., the rate of change in service prices expressed in labor units is remarkably similar: − 1.1% and − 0.9%, per annum, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market transaction data are used to estimate the quantity of specie in circulation. This estimate is used to provide the first comprehensive measure of a colony''s money supply and, along with data on population and prices, to retest the quantity theory of money and measure output growth using the equation of exchange. Output growth is found to depend on periodization and the extent that rising commercialization increased the velocity of circulation. Specie was becoming relatively less scarce as the Revolution approached, and movements in specie and paper currency both offset and reinforced each other depending on the period of analysis. (JEL N11, N21, E42, E51) [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reexamines the first viable and a still leading explanation for mid-twentieth century baby booms: Richard Easterlin's relative income hypothesis. He suggested that when incomes are higher than material aspirations (formed in childhood), birth rates would rise. This paper uses microeconomic data to formulate a measure of an individual's relative income. The use of microeconomic data allows the researcher to control for both state fixed effects and cohort fixed effects, both have been absent in previous examinations of Easterlin's hypothesis. The results of the empirical analysis are consistent with Easterlin's assertion that relative income influenced fertility decisions, although the effect operates only through childhood income. When the estimated effects are contextualized, they explain 12% of the U.S. baby boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of mechanical refrigeration on temporal and spatial price relationships for regional egg markets in the United States, 1880–1911. Notably, this period encompasses an era in which widespread adoption of mechanical refrigeration facilitated the ability to store otherwise perishable commodities. This development in turn altered observed price dynamics for many perishables, including fresh eggs. We use a class of time series models, time–varying autoregressions (TVARs), to document both the structural change and the corresponding impact on spatial price dynamics for U.S. regional egg price relationships during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our results reveal that, while spatially distinct markets remained integrated, the opportunity to store eggs over time often resulted in weaker spatial price relationships for eggs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits were famously widespread, only some parts of the country responded with large and durable partisan shifts. One reason is that several factors, including pre-New Deal economic hardship, Dust Bowl conditions, and New Deal spending, appear to have had effects that were largely transitory (i.e., faded by 1940). A complementary reason is that swing electorates can, and did, swing both ways. By contrast, several other variables -- notably economic and demographic factors discussed in the previous literature -- are related to relatively durable shifts. Finally, heterogeneity in marginal responses may have mattered greatly to national-level Democratic success. By demonstrating which factors were transitory and which were more durable, this paper illuminates the New Deal Realignment and, more generally, the influence of economic conditions and distributive policy on voter behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we quantify the difference between public and private prices of residential electricity immediately before and after major federal reforms in the 1930s and 1940s. Previous research found that public prices were lower in a sample of large, urban markets. Based on new data covering over 15,000 markets and nearly all electricity generated for residential consumption, we find that the difference between public and private prices was small in 1935 and negligible in 1940 for typical levels of monthly consumption. These findings are consistent with a market for ownership that helped to discipline electricity prices during this period. That is, private rents were mitigated by the threat that municipalities would use public ownership to respond to constituent complaints and public rents were limited by electoral competition and the growth of private provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the medical histories of a sample of 25,000 Union Army soldiers and veterans to study the determinants of diagnosis, discharge, and mortality from tuberculosis. We find that water and airborne diseases during the war contributed significantly to the presence of tuberculosis. Height and a higher body mass index (BMI) are also associated with protection against TB but these effects are not always robust. As an upper bound, we estimate that the contribution of modern gains in height and in BMI to the mortality decline of tuberculosis ranges from one-fourth to one-half with the rest explained by the decline in the prevalence of water and airborne diseases, especially diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid played. The paper finds weaker support for alternative hypotheses that rely on occupational influences and exogenous changes in the virulence of tuberculosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines new data on wealth and wealth accumulation by blacks and whites in Calhoun County, South Carolina between 1910 and 1919. Despite focusing on a single county, the data utilized in this paper make it possible to explore property accumulation by southern blacks and whites in new ways. Unlike previous studies, this one provides information on both real quantities and dollar assessments. This breakdown reveals that the rapid accumulation of property by blacks was entirely real and not due in part to an increasingly discriminatory assessment policy. By merging the assessment data with individual-level census records, it is possible to examine how wealth and wealth accumulation were influenced by race, gender, age, occupation, and literacy. In particular, the effect of literacy on the wealth of black men in 1910 was found to be economically strong in high wealth quantiles but weak in low wealth quantiles. By 1919, the impact of literacy on the wealth of black men had become economically important across the board. Furthermore, literacy had a significant influence on the relative size of wealth accumulations but offered little protection against low accumulations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recovery from the Great Depression began in March 1933, simultaneous to Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. However, the pace of that recovery between that date and the Second World War was extremely uneven with some dramatic starts and stops. Between March and July 1933, manufacturing production rose 78%, production of durable goods was up 199%, total industrial production rose 57%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 71%. Then the economy contracted sharply again beginning in August 1933–the July 1933 level of industrial production was not reached again until August 1935. This paper addresses two questions. What factors were responsible for bringing about the sharp recovery in the spring of 1933 and what factors brought this short-lived economic surge to an end? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have increasingly turned to height data to gain insight into a population's standard of living. Because height measures are used when other data are unavailable, testing their reliability can be difficult, and concerns over sample selection have led to several vigorous debates within the heights literature. In this paper, I use a unique contemporaneous census to gauge the extent of selection into a contested sample of American Indian heights. I have linked people from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation to the 1890 Cherokee Census. An initial analysis finds evidence of negative selection into the Boas sample. A detailed examination of those measured reveals a more complex story. Two distinct groups are present within the data. The first group consists of 64 members of the Cherokee elite. Their households owned more land, invested more in improvements to their land, and had higher literacy rates. The remainder of the Boas sample is poor relative to both the elite and the rest of the Cherokee Nation. Part, but not all, of this difference is due to their residential location. Forty percent of the Boas sample lived in poorest district of Cherokee Nation. These differences in wealth between the two groups were mirrored by a fairly dramatic difference in average heights. The average height of all men in elite group was 173.9 cm while the non-elite were several centimeters shorter at just 171.2 cm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several factors influenced the composition of migrants in the early 20th century, including World War I, the Literacy Act of 1917, and the implementation of strict immigration quotas. This paper examines whether the United States' first immigration quota, established under the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, affected migrant selection. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 severely capped the number of admittable migrants by nationality. Canadian migrants, or any migrants who resided in Canada for five consecutive years, were unrestricted by the quota and could freely migrate to the U.S. Using transcribed ship records from states bordering Canada (specifically New York, Alaska, and Washington), I compare the skills of restricted migrants to the skills of unrestricted Canadian migrants, before and after establishment of the 1921 quota. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that the quota resulted in migrants of higher skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which unskilled internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading may have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. Census and county-level wage data, I present results consistent with this argument, with a focus on shorter distance movers. Conditioning on migrant status, I find that unskilled migrants who moved to places with high skill premiums were most likely to upgrade. 1 offer some evidence that migrant sorting explains much of this result. My results imply that previous research focusing solely on wage gains provides an incomplete picture of the factors motivating east-west migration in nineteenth century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses new data on the task content of occupations to present a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent computerization episode, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a "hollowing out" of the skill distribution whereby workers in the middle of the distribution lost out to those at the extremes. OLS estimates show that electrification increased the demand for clerical, numerical, planning and people skills relative to manual skills while simultaneously reducing relative demand for the dexterity-intensive jobs which comprised the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, early twentieth century technological change was unskill-biased for blue collar tasks but skill-biased on aggregate. These results are in line with the downward trend in wage differentials within U.S. manufacturing up to 1950. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship of inequality to school funding in counties of the U.S. in 1890. Inequality, measured here on the basis of farm-size distributions, is found to be negatively related to local school property tax revenues across the whole sample of 1345 rural counties. However, further analysis shows that this relationship is not consistent across the sample. In the North, there is a significant negative relationship between inequality and school funding, and this relationship is shown to be consistent with the fact that assessed values of property did not rise linearly with wealth. Across the South, there is no distinct relationship between inequality and school funding. The results also indicate that inequality in the South cannot directly explain the gap in school funding with the North, in the sense that redistributing farms in the South to match the Northern distributions leads to no predicted increase in school funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of banking market structure and regulation on economic growth using new data on banking market concentration and manufacturing industry-level growth rates for U.S. states during 1899-1929--a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and restrictive branching laws segmented the U.S. banking system geographically. Unlike studies of developing and developed countries today, we find that banking market concentration generally had a positive impact on manufacturing sector growth in the early twentieth century United States, with a somewhat stronger impact on industries with smaller establishments, lower rates of incorporation, and less reliance on bond markets (and, hence, relatively more reliance on banks). Because regulations affecting bank entry varied considerably across states and the industrial organization of the U.S. banking system differs markedly from those of other countries, we consider the impact of other aspects of banking market structure and policy on growth. Even after controlling for differences in the prevalence of branch banking, deposit insurance, and other aspects of policy and market structure, we find that market concentration boosted industrial growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we estimate the social costs and income transfers of Cherokee removal, i.e., "The Trail of Tears." Our cost estimates provide several new insights into this extensively studied topic. First, our estimate of the number of removal-related fatalities is considerably lower than the commonly accepted figure of 4000. Second, the uncompensated value of ceded Cherokee land in the southeast was the largest cost borne by the Cherokees, followed in magnitude by the value of lost agricultural output due to removal. Third, American taxpayers paid for roughly 44% of the total social costs of removal. Also, the cost burden of Cherokee removal, as a share of 1 year's GDP, was greater for the Cherokees than the cost burden of any major war for the American population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many postbellum southern farms specialized in cotton, but black-operated farms planted much larger shares of cotton than white-operated farms. This paper tests various explanations for the pattern of specialization using 1879 farm-specific data, We find that the cross-sectional racial variation in cotton share is largely explained by location and on-farm labor supply conditions, consequences of the legacy of slavery, rather than debt constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses program notes from the Metropolitan opera to quantify changes in ethnic preferences as a result of news of German atrocities during World War I; these data indicate that the War created a persistent shift in ethnic preferences, which effectively switched the status of German Americans from a mainstream ethnicity to an ethnic minority until the late 1920s. Difference-in-difference analyses investigate whether this shift in preferences triggered taste-based discrimination in one of the world's most elite professional settings: applications to trade at the NYSE. This analysis indicates that changes in preferences more than doubled the probability that applicants with German-sounding names would be rejected. Placebo regressions for other non-German minorities yield no evidence of taste effects. Equivalent regressions that distinguish German Jewish from other Jewish applicants, however, indicate that German Jewish applicants were similarly affected as were other Germans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the issue of using infant and childhood mortality as an indicator of inequality. The case is that of the United States in the 20th century. Using microdata from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Microsamples (IPUMS), published data from the Birth Registration Area in the 1920s, results from a number of surveys, and the Linked Birth & Infant Death Files from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1991, infant and child mortality can be related to such other variables as occupation of father or mother, education of father or mother, family income, race, ethnicity, and residence. The evidence shows that, although there have been large absolute reductions in the level of infant and child mortality rates and also a reduction in the absolute levels of differences across socioeconomic groups, relative inequality has not diminished over the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper answers the following question. If returns from smuggling cotton and contraband through the blockade of Confederate ports during the American Civil War were significantly lower than earnings from alternative investments, why did private firms so quickly adopt costly purpose-built steam ships in the face of the strengthening Northern blockade? First, we note that the rate of diffusion of steam ships, specially designed to run the blockade significantly exceeded any reported for innovations from the late 19th or early 20th century. Second, we correct an error in Stanley Lebergott's (1981) seminal work and conclude that that returns to infamous steamer, the Banshee (I) of 700% to be quite plausible. This finding of high returns is confirmed by two other historical sources, which have not been previously used. Additionally, we calculate that investors in the one of the leading blockade running firms, known as the Bee Company, earned in excess of 86% return on their investment, over double the profits previously reported. Finally, we demonstrate that adoption of purpose-built ships, significantly decreased the arrival rate of capture, thus increasing expected profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1915 and 1920,18 U.S. states considered the introduction of compulsory health insurance. Progressive reformers expected state health insurance to be welfare enhancing for American wage-workers since it would result in lower cost insurance and an extension of coverage to more of the population. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that the absence of broad political support for health insurance legislation in this early period reflects that compulsory insurance would not have improved on what was available and affordable through voluntary arrangements and had the potential to reduce the welfare of wage-earners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though almost no postwar union contracts indexed wage rates to prices of the employer's products, union agreements linking wage rates to product prices, known as sliding scales, were common in some industries in the United States and Britain from the 1860s through the 1930s. This paper explains why sliding scales disappeared after the 1930s, and examines what practical experience with sliding scales revealed about fundamental constraints on wage indexation. Paradoxically, the history of sliding scales confirms that workers' information about product prices and materials costs is generally imperfect, in ways that would substantially constrain wage indexation in long-term contracts. Sliding scales were not indexed long-term contracts, but rather devices to forestall costly strikes in the absence of contracts by revealing employers' private information about product demand. In the postwar US, unions and employers failed to link wage rates to product prices because they had gained the ability to enter binding contracts, which could achieve the benefits of preventing strikes without incurring the extra negotiation costs and information problems associated with product-price indexation. I present a model to show how sliding scales could forestall strikes by revealing information, and how the introduction of binding union contracts reduced incentives to link wages to product prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two centuries, the reallocation of labor out of agriculture has been a dominant feature of structural change and economic growth in the United States. This paper uses an accounting framework founded in economic theory to decompose this reallocation into three components: a demand-side effect due to the low income elasticity of demand for agricultural goods (Engel effect), and two supply-side effects, one due to differential sectoral productivity growth rates (Baumol effect), and the other to differential capital deepening. The results show that the Engel effect accounts for almost all labor reallocation until the 1950s, after which the Baumol effect becomes a key determinant. Our framework provides a unified account of long-run structural change, and demonstrates that historical interpretations and theoretical models that emphasize only one dimension of this process cannot properly account for the dramatic history of labor reallocation in the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Estimated labor force participation rates among free women in the pre-Civil War period were exceedingly low. This is due, in part, to cultural or societal expectations of the role of women and the lack of thorough enumeration by Census takers. This paper develops an augmented labor force participation rate for free women in 1860 and compares it with the augmented rate for 1920 and today. Our methodology identifies women who are likely providing informal and unenumerated labor for market production in support of a family business, that is, unreported family workers. These individuals are not coded in the original data as formally working, but are likely to be engaged in the labor force on the basis of the self-employment of other relatives in their household. Unreported family workers are classified into four categories: farm, merchant, craft, and boardinghouse keepers. Using microdata, the inclusion of these workers more than triples the free female labor force participation rate in the 1860 Census from 16 percent to 57 percent, more than doubles the participation rate in the 1920 Census from 24 percent to 50 percent, and has a small effect on the currently measured rate of 56 percent (2015-2019 American Community Survey). This suggests that rather than a steep rise from a very low level in the female labor force participation rate since 1860, it has in fact always been high and fairly stable over time. In contrast, the effect of including unreported family workers in the male augmented labor force participation rate is relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The birth of commercial banking in New England after the American Revolution provides an important case to examine banking development under asymmetric information. Similar to credit markets in developing countries today, bank borrowers of early America usually had little or no collateral. This paper uses a unique data set based on loans between 1803 and 1833 for Plymouth Bank to examine bank lending policies in the absence of collateral. Empirical evidence suggests that borrowers with little collateral established their credit-worthiness through repeated interaction with banks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: On the basis of anecdotes centered on the alleged “circuitous routing of checks,” researchers focusing on the pre-Fed check-clearing system have usually argued that it was inefficient. In this paper we study a 1910 check remittance register from the State National Bank of Bloomington, Illinois—we dissect the way the bank forwarded checks to various destinations for clearing and collection. We find that the bank followed an orderly process of check remittance according to which checks tended to move in the “right direction.” This casts doubts on the alleged pervasiveness of cycling and circuitous routing of an extreme nature in the pre-Fed check-clearing process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: By relating strike outcomes and durations to the value of the disputed wage change and to the cost to each side of continuing the strike, this paper tests the hypothesis that the war of attrition with asymmetric information model of strikes accurately describes the characteristics of strikes over wages in the United States in the early to middle part of the 1880s. That hypothesis is not rejected by linear, probit, or nonparametric kernel estimation. Specifically, variables that decrease a side’s cost of striking or increase its opponent’s cost are shown to increase its maximum holdout time, and vice versa, and strike duration increases with the value of the prize in dispute and with uncertainty about the outcome. Alternative game theoretic models of strikes—signaling and screening models, and models with ongoing negotiations—do not fit the data as well. We also explore why the strikes took the form of wars of attrition, and why later strikes did not. Our results have implications for modern union behavior in the face of globalization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents new annual estimates of U.S. production of pig iron and imports of pig iron products dating back to 1827. These estimates are used to assess the vulnerability of the antebellum iron industry to foreign competition and the role of the tariff in fostering the industry’s early development. Domestic pig iron production is found to be highly sensitive to changes in import prices. Although import price fluctuations had a much greater impact on U.S. production than changes in import duties, our estimates suggest that the tariff permitted domestic output to be about 30–40 percent larger than it would have been without protection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the shift in childbirth from home to hospital that occurred in the United States in the early 20th century. Using a panel of city-level data over the period 1928–1940, we examine the impact on maternal mortality resulting from the shift of childbirth from home to hospital. Results suggest that until the late 1930s when sulfa drugs were developed, medical intervention had a limited impact on maternal mortality. Post-sulfa, the medicalization of childbirth reduced maternal mortality. Regressions estimated separately by race provide mixed evidence as to whether blacks and whites benefited differentially from medical intervention. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the role of mechanical refrigeration in seasonality and structural change in the U.S. hog–corn cycle, 1870–1940. This period covers an era in which the widespread adoption of mechanical refrigeration greatly affected the ability to store and transport perishable commodities. These developments in turn altered the seasonal production and price structure for many commodities, including pork. We use a new class of time series models, time-varying smooth transition autoregressions (TV-STARs), to document both the structural change and the nonlinear features observed in seasonal patterns for the U.S. hog–corn price relationship during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This note draws attention to an important data error that is at the center of our paper “Gold Shocks, Liquidity, and the United States Economy during the National Banking Era” (this journal 1998). The gold stock series we used was compiled from the annual reports of the US Treasury, which contains a large drop between May and June, 1907. This drop was an error. We redo our original statistical work with a revised series. Our results are robust to the new gold stock series. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Using panel data on 12 European source countries that are followed for 26 years (1873–1898), this paper studies age-specific emigration rates and the age composition of U.S. immigration. Two age groups are the focus of attention, 15–40 and over 40. Emigration-rate models and compositional models that satisfy adding-up conditions are estimated by the Hausman–Taylor Instrumental Variable approach. Younger migrants responded more strongly to job opportunities than to wage differentials, whereas older migrants responded more strongly to wage differentials. Both age groups tended to follow recent past migrants to the U.S. Relatively many younger (and relatively fewer older) migrants came from countries with higher percentages of their work forces in agriculture. Higher source-country birthrates discouraged younger migrants, presumably by raising the cost of family migration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Between 1880 and 1930, cooperative insurance was the main source of illness, accident, and death insurance in the United States, Canada, and England. This paper tests for asymmetric information in cooperative insurance societies and examines how their pricing policies affected the profile of members. We find strong evidence that, unlike their modern substitutes, cooperative societies were able to overcome the asymmetry of information. Furthermore, as a consequence of non-actuarial pricing, our results suggest that workers deferred their membership until they were about 40 years old. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In May 1830, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the Indian Removal Act that authorized the president of the United States to exchange land west of the Mississippi River for Indian land in the east and appropriated $500,000 to assist tribes in the move west. Three days later the House also passed the Preemption Act of 1830, giving squatters a right of first refusal to purchase land they had occupied prior to its being opened for sale. In a recent paper, finds that the willingness of squatters to illegally occupy federal lands greatly raised the cost of enforcing property rights and this was a significant factor behind the passage of the first general Preemption Act in 1830. We build on his work to test the hypothesis that Congressmen who favored squatters’ rights would also favor moving Indian tribes out of the old southwest. A logit analysis of the vote on the Removal Act of 1830 shows three statistically significant variables. Democrats, representatives from slaveholding districts, and those who voted for preemption were more likely to vote for removal. Congressmen from slave states were very likely to favor both Acts, which stands in contrast to southern opposition to a homestead act in the late 1850s. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The relatively high marital fertility of the Irish in the United States in the 19th century has long been interpreted as evidence for the persistence of a distinctive Irish culture in the United States. This claim echoes a similar view of Irish-American marriage patterns. Recent work has shown that the marriage patterns of the Irish in the United States were similar to native-born whites with similar occupational and other characteristics. This paper studies the reasons for the high fertility of Irish-Americans in 1910. Irish-born women in that year had much larger families than the typical native-born woman, and little of the difference can be attributed to other characteristics. Second-generation Irishwomen were less distinctive in this regard, although even they differed from the natives primarily because of a different proclivity to have a large family. Our results signal the complexity of immigrant adjustment to a new environment; the Irish largely abandoned one aspect of Irish demographic behavior while clinging to another. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Industrialization and urbanization are seen as interdependent processes of modern economic development. However, the exact nature of their causal relationship is still open to considerable debate. This paper uses firm-level data from the manuscripts of the decennial censuses between 1850 and 1880 to examine whether the adoption of the steam engine as the primary power source by manufacturers during industrialization contributed to urbanization. While the data indicate that steam-powered firms were more likely to locate in urban areas than water-powered firms, the adoption of the steam engine did not contribute substantially to urbanization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper conducts an econometric test of Diamond and Dybvig’s [Diamond, D., Dybvig, P., 1983. Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity. Journal of Political Economy 91, 401–420] theory of bank runs as interpreted by Chari [Chari, V.V., 1989. Banking without deposit insurance or banks panics: lessons from a model of the U.S. national banking system. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 13, 3–19] and Calomiris and Gorton [Calomiris, C., Gorton, G., 1991. Origins of banking panics: models, facts, and bank regulation. In: Hubbard, R.G. (Ed.), Financial Markets and Financial Crises. NBER and Univ. Chicago press, Chicago, pp. 109–173]. We test whether or not seasonal deposit drains on New York banks coincide with the bank panics of 1873 and 1893 in the United States. We use individual bank level data to illuminate the reason for withdrawals. The evidence reveals that the panic of 1873 could have included a seasonal interior drain. A seasonal interpretation of Diamond and Dybvig’s model cannot be applied to the bank panic of 1893. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 1836, the state of Indiana set out to build a Mammoth system of canals, railroads, and turnpikes following a decade of intense debate in which sectional rivalries prevented any state action. This paper investigates the role played by the adoption of an ad valorem property tax in ameliorating the sectional rivalries and coordinating the costs of financing the transportation system with the taxes levied to finance it. It also traces the rise and fall of land values in the state between 1835 and 1842, estimating the effect of internal improvement projects on land values. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Short-term contracts were a staple of the American residential mortgage market until the Great Depression, after which policymakers pushed for longer terms in order to eliminate refinancing risk. Using a first-of-its-kind data set on mortgages outstanding in 1930, this paper suggests that short-term contracts had remained popular until the Depression because of their appeal to a class of well-off sophisticated borrowers who were undeterred by refinancing risk, and who valued flexible amortization. In contrast, typical wage earners preferred longer terms in order to eliminate refinancing risk, even as they took on the burden of regular amortization payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that conditional cash transfers under Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a main program of the 1935 Social Security Act, reduced infant, children and adult mortality. I take advantage of the transition from mothers' pensions to ADC and the large differences in ADC payments and eligibility across 104 cities, 2,260 counties, and 49 states to estimate the impacts of cash transfers on mortality rates, by age, sex, race, and cause between 1929 and 1944. I find that ADC's expansion reduced infant and adult mortality by between 10 and 20 percent. This finding, based on an event-study design, is robust to a range of specifications, difference-and-differences, an instrumental variable strategy, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests and a border-pair policy discontinuity design. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although municipal budgets fared well on average during the Great Depression, many suffered greatly. In newspapers and trade publications, observers blamed distress in real estate markets as well as the rise in tax delinquency and real debt obligations. This paper uses a sample of large US cities to estimate how those factors influenced municipal revenue and expenditures during the Depression. Results show that city finances were stable when facing the housing market distress that plagued many urban areas in the 1930s. The principal elements of fiscal strain were actually rising delinquency, which was associated with diminished revenue and operating expenditures, and growing real debt obligations, which were associated with reduced capital outlays. Thus local budgets were driven more by the behavior of taxpayers and obligations to city creditors than by the downturn in real estate markets. These findings illuminate municipal governments' responses to the fiscal strain wrought by the Depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]