A variety of scholars with widely differing political and disciplinary orientations continue to be fascinated by the prospect of making endogenous variation or changes in institutional structures through the use of a general model. While sympathetic to the appeal of such a research program, I...

Economists and economic historians tend to use the terms capital and machinery interchangeably, even though machinery rarely constitutes one fifth and sometimes is as little as one tenth of a nation's reproducible tangible assets. This habit can distort the way economists think and talk about...

More than half the variance in length of school session in a cross section of 329 localities in Massachusetts in 1855 can be explained by the share of Irish in the town's population, the family per dwelling ratio, and a proxy for the share of male merchants over 15 in the population, all of...

The argument of this paper reduces to two key propositions. First, legal rules differ where technologies and endowments are similar. Second, diversity matters, in the sense that it exercises an independent influence on economic structure and rates of economic growth, and in ways that have not...

The communication sector of an economy comprises a range of technologies, physical media, and institutions/rules that facilitate the storage of information through means other than a society's oral tradition and its transmission over distances beyond the normal reach of human conversation. This...

In the immediate postwar period, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow both examined data on output and input growth from the first half of the twentieth century and reached similar conclusions. In the twentieth century, in contrast with the nineteenth, a much smaller fraction of real output growth...

Between 1890 and 2004, total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the United States has been strongly procyclical, while labor productivity growth has been mildly so. This chapter argues that these results are not simply a statistical artifact, as Mathew Shapiro and others have argued....

This paper examines the relationships between occupational structure, dissent, and educational commitment in a sample of seventeen commercial and manufacturing localities in Lancashire in 1841. In this sample the structure of educational systems as measured by the mix of Sunday and day schooling...

German. industrial expansion in the period 1880¿1913 was significantly more rapid than that of the United Kingdom, and substantially less volatile than that of the United States. A partial explanation for the relatively stable growth path of the German economy during these years may be found in...