This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18th-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at...

Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American contingents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities.  From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse...

Argues that the decline in physical stature of the American population beginning with 1835 was related to the concomitants of the onset of modern economic growth and not entirely to changes in the disease environment.

We construct decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the Mid-Atlantic region between 1720 and 1800. They show that the region likely achieved modest improvements in per capita GDP over this period despite a number of demographic factors that tended to slow the pace of...

This is an unpublished comment on a Perkin's paper that surveyed banking in colonial America. It argues that historians have overlooked a number of abortive banking schemes in the colonies, implying that the absence of banks was not an "entrepreneurial failure." and that the extension of the...