Due primarily to transport improvements, commodity prices in Britain and America tended to equalize 1870-1913. This commodity price equalization was not simply manifested by the great New World grain invasion of Europe. Rather, it can be documented for intermediate primary products and...

The 1920s marked the end of a century of mass migration from Europe to the New World. This paper examines analytically this pre-quota experience. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first deals with the character and dimensions of overseas emigration from Europe chiefly from the mid...

This paper examines the determinants of overseas mass migration from eleven European countries in the late 19th century. They typically passed through something like a half-century life-cycle: a steep rise in emigration rates from low levels in preindustrial decades, followed by a plateau of...

This paper augments the new historical literature on factor price convergence. The focus is on the late nineteenth century, when economic convergence among the current OECD countries was dramatic; and the focus is on the convergence between Old World and New, by far the biggest participants in...

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate...

The Latin countries -- Italy, Portugal and Spain -- were industrial late-comers and only experienced mass emigration late in the 19th century. When they did join the European mass migration, they did so in great numbers. The fact that they joined the mass migrations late, that they were poor by...

This paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. As the paper's title suggests, technological change is...

Why did international capital flows rise to such heights in the late 19th century, the years between 1907 and 1913 in particular? Britain placed half of her annual savings abroad during those seven years, and 76 percent of it went to the New World countries of Canada, Australia, the USA,...

Debate over the economic convergence of currently industrialized nations has suffered a number of shortcomings. First, the underlying data base has typically been limited to Agnus Maddison's GNP and GNP per worker hour. This paper offers a new data base, purchasing-power-parity adjusted real...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...