Hours at work and total factor productivity growth in nineteenth-century U.S. agriculture / Lee A. Craig, Thomas Weiss -- Factor endowments and contract choice / Alan Dye -- Moral hazard and asset specificity in the Renaissance : the economics of sharecropping in 1427 Florence / Francesco L....

"Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint - critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded...

"The Great Depression of the 1930s often recalls images of the drought-stricken Great Plains. Prolonged drought exacerbated the economic effects of the Great Depression to such a degree that the prairies became the epicentre of the disaster in Canada. Between 1929 and 1932, per capita incomes...