During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction...

Recent research has pointed to large gaps in labor productivity between the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors in low-income countries, as well as between workers in rural and urban areas. Most estimates are based on national accounts or repeated cross-sections of micro-survey data, and as...

Why do developing countries fail to specialize in products in which they appear to have a comparative advantage? We propose a model of agricultural trade with intermediation that explains how hold-up resulting from poor contracting environments can produce such an outcome. We use the model to...

We model the relationship between local agricultural surpluses, nutritional status, and height, and we test the hypothesis that adult height is positively correlated with the local production of nutrition in infancy. We test the hypothesis on two samples of Union Army recruits - one consisting...

Covered mortgage bonds have been used successfully in Europe for two centuries, but failed in the U.S. when introduced as farm mortgage debentures in the 1880s. Using firm-level data and a sample of loans made by one Kansas mortgage company, I find that debenture programs grew out of established...