Government involvement in transportation infrastructure is often wasteful because improvements are made where they are not needed or necessary improvements are more costly or of lower quality than they would be if privately owned. Early in the nation's history, large numbers of bridges, roads,...

Historians have claimed that Canadian manufacturing grew in the nineteenth century largely because of the National Policy tariff. . In the case of the cotton textile sector, our findings cast serious doubt on the long-standing idea that the National Policy was indispensable to the growth of...

Infant industry protection has been the cornerstone of a debate on tariff policy that extends at least from the eighteenth century to the current day. In contrast to traditional neo-classical models of international trade that imply net negative effects, industrial organization and...

We examine impacts of market integration on the development of American manufacturing, as railroads expanded through the latter half of the 19th century. Using new county-by-industry data from the Census of Manufactures, we estimate substantial impacts on manufacturing productivity from relative...

This study analyzes the legal problems in the development and management of Chesapeake Bay resources. There are threshold problems of definition - What is Chesapeake Bay? What are its resources? What role does law play in their development and management? The "Historical Perspective" traces the...

This paper makes use of American patent data to shed light on the geographical history of invention, and introduces a methodology (the Wellesley Technology Concordance) which creates matrices describing the distribution of patents by 43 industries of manufacture and 50 sectors of use, along with...

Since its inception, supporters of the Jones Act have claimed that the law is essential to U.S. national security. Although indefensible on economic grounds, Jones Act advocates argue that its restrictions promote the development of both a U.S. merchant marine and shipbuilding and repair...

The Philadelphia & Reading was conceived to transport anthracite coal from the mining regions of Pennsylvania to the tidewater at Philadelphia. It built its roads and other system infrastructure during one of the worst economic depressions in U.S. history (the Panic of 1837, Crisis of 1839, and...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital and skill using variation across U.S. counties in immigration-induced skill-mix changes between 1860 and 1930. We find that capital began as a q-complement for skilled and unskilled workers, and then dramatically increased its...