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Abstract:
We provide a comprehensive view of widening income inequality in the United States contrasting conditions since 1980 with those in earlier postwar years. We argue that the income distribution in each period was strongly shaped by a set of economic institutions. The early postwar years were dominated by unions, a negotiating framework set in the Treaty of Detroit, progressive taxes, and a high minimum wage - all parts of a general government effort to broadly distribute the gains from growth. More recent years have been characterized by reversals in all these dimensions in an institutional pattern known as the Washington Consensus. Other explanations for income disparities including skill-biased technical change and international trade are seen as factors operating within this broader institutional story.

Abstract:
We provide a comprehensive view of widening income inequality in the United States contrasting conditions since 1980 with those in earlier postwar years. We argue that the income distribution in each period was strongly shaped by a set of economic institutions. The early postwar years were dominated by unions, a negotiating framework set in the Treaty of Detroit, progressive taxes, and a high minimum wage - all parts of a general government effort to broadly distribute the gains from growth. More recent years have been characterized by reversals in all these dimensions in an institutional pattern known as the Washington Consensus. Other explanations for income disparities including skill-biased technical change and international trade are seen as factors operating within this broader institutional story.

Income inequality, Institutions, Treaty of Detroit, Washington Consensus

Abstract:
The efficient markets hypothesis implies that, in the presence of rational investors, bubbles cannot develop. We analyse the trading behaviour of a sophisticated investor, a London goldsmith bank, during the South Sea bubble in 1720. The bank believed the stock to be overvalued, yet found it profitable not to attack the bubble. Detailed examination of daily transactions in the London stock market shows that 'riding the bubble' was a highly profitable strategy. These findings lend support to recent theoretical work arguing that predictable investor sentiment may prevent rational investors from attacking a bubble.

Speculation, bubbles, investor sentiment, South Sea company

Abstract:
This paper presents a case study of a well-informed investor in the South Sea bubble. We argue that Hoare's Bank, a fledgling West End London banker, knew that a bubble was in progress and that it invested knowingly in the bubble; it was profitable to ride the bubble. Using a unique dataset on daily trades, we show that this sophisticated investor was not constrained by institutional factors such as restrictions on short sales or agency problems. Instead, this study demonstrates that predictable investor sentiment can prevent attacks on a bubble; rational investors may only attack when some coordinating event promotes joint action.

Bubbles, Crashes, Synchronization Risk, Predictability, Investor Sentiment, South Sea Bubble, Market Timing, Limits to Arbitrage, Efficient Market, Hypothesis

Abstract:
I argue here that the economy of the early Roman Empire was primarily a market economy. The parts of this economy located far from each other were not tied together as tightly as markets often are today, but they still functioned as part of a comprehensive Mediterranean market. There are two reasons why this conclusion is important. First, it brings the description of the Roman economy as a whole into accord with the fragmentary evidence we have about individual market transactions. Second, this synthetic view provides a platform on which to investigate further questions about the origins and eventual demise of the Roman economy and about conditions for the formation and preservation of markets in general.

Early Roman Empire, Roman economy, Market economies

Abstract:
In this paper I use a theoretical hierarchy of financial sources to evaluate the effectiveness of financial markets in the early Roman Empire. I first review the theory of financial intermediation to describe the hierarchy of financial sources and survey briefly the history of financial intermediation in pre-industrial Western Europe to provide a standard against which to evaluate the Roman evidence. I then describe the nature of financial arrangements in the early Roman Empire in terms of this hierarchy. The issue turns out to be not whether financial markets in Rome resembled those in other advanced agricultural economies, but rather which 18th century European economy did it resemble most closely. This exercise reveals the extent to which the Roman economy resembled more recent societies and sheds light on the prospects for economic growth in the Roman Empire, for good financial markets and institutions help people who have ideas for production get resources to implement those ideas.

Roman Empire, Banking, Credit

Abstract:
The Great Depression reached a turning point in the currency crises of 1931 and the German banking and currency crisis was a critical event whose causes are still debated. We demonstrate in this paper that the crisis was primarily domestic in origin; that it was a currency crisis rather than a banking crisis; and that the failure was more political than economic. We clarify the arguments involved as we present this view. German banks failed in 1931, but the problem was not primarily with them. Instead, the crisis was a failure of political will in a time of turmoil.

Great Depression, Germany Currency Crisis, German banking, Germany

Abstract:
This paper demonstrates the presence of Heckscher-Ohlin type trade in bulk commodities in the early Iron Age. I study the trade going across the Mediterranean Sea, where costs of transport were low. I combine evidence from under-water archaeology for the existence of this trade with literary evidence about its organization. I argue that international trade was effected by market transactions well before the invention of coinage. The forces for trade analyzed by Heckscher were strong almost three millennia before he wrote, and they produced extensive trade in Biblical times.

International Trade, Heckscher-Ohlin, Biblical Era, Ancient History, Shipwrecks

Abstract:
Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century private loan market balanced through quantity rationing. Using a unique set of observations on lending volume at a London goldsmith bank, Hoare's, we document the impact of wartime financing on private credit markets. We conclude that there is considerable evidence that government borrowing, especially during wartime, crowded out private credit.

credit rationing, Napoleonic wars, Industrial Revolution, technological change, crowding out

Abstract:
Analysis of the financial revolution in England has often focused on changes in public debt management and the interest rates paid by the state. Much less is known about the evolution of the financial system providing credit to individual borrowers. We document the transition from goldsmith to banker in the case of Richard Hoare, and examine the operation of the loan market during the early eighteenth century. Learning how to use the relatively new technology of deposit banking was crucial for the bank's success and survival. Innovation during the early stages of the British Industrial Revolution was not limited to manufacturing and transport, but played a critical role also in the service sector.

Banking and credit, English Industrial Revolution, interest rate determination, credit rationing, technological change and learning

Abstract:
We examine monetization in the early Roman Empire by considering money as a unit of account. Widespread use of prices indicates widespread monetization. A consistent set of prices for wheat indicates that this monetization encouraged trade to grow across the Mediterranean. This argument is documented with a statistical test, preceded by a non-technical introduction and followed by consideration of a range of possible objections.

money, monetization, international trade, regression analysis, early Roman Empire

Abstract:
I argue that it makes sense to speak of a functioning labor market in the early Roman Empire where the supply and demand for labor were equilibrated by wages and other payments to workers, albeit in a rough way. The economy of the early Roman Empire therefore had a market in this critical factor of production that resembles the labor market in more recent market economies. Slaves were included in the general labor market because Roman slavery was very different from modern slavery in the Americas. In the early Roman Empire, frequent manumission provided incentives for slaves to cooperate with their owners and act like free laborers.

Labor force, Slavery, Roman Empire

Abstract:
Finance is important for development, yet the onset of modern economic growth in Britain lagged the British financial revolution by over a century. We present evidence from a new West-End London private bank to explain this delay. Hoare's Bank loaned primarily to a highly select and well-born clientele, although it did not discriminate against "unknown" borrowers in the early 18th century. It could not extend credit more generally because of government restrictions (usury limits) and policies (frequent wars). Britain's financial development could have aided growth substantially, had it not been for the rigidities and turmoil introduced by government interference.

Financial Revolution, growth, finance, rationing, usury laws, institutional evelopment, eighteenth-century England

Abstract:
This paper surveys the causes of American business cycles for the century 1890 - 1990. Causes are taken to be exogenous shocks to a model with largely endogenous policy makers. Causes are classified as either real or monetary and domestic or foreign. All four causes were found to have led to cycles in the past century. This diversity was found in all time periods and for all size cycles. There were more domestic than foreign causes, confirming the relative independence of the American economy from external conditions. There were more real than monetary causes, conflicting with the popular view that monetary shocks are the source of most cycles.

Abstract:
This paper, written primarily for historians, attempts to explain why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which we and others have documented elsewhere, but on the reasons why policy makers chose the policies they did. We argue that the mentality of the gold standard was pervasive and compelling to the leaders of the interwar economy. It was expressed and reinforced by the discourse among these leaders. It was opposed and finally defeated by mass politics, but only after the interaction of national policies had drawn the world into the Great Depression.

Abstract:
In this short essay, we have summarized a new literature that analyzes the effects of the elite on economics, which is in the school of literature that departs from pure economics and goes on to analyze exogenous factors as psychology, political science and sociology. However, an entire economic history literature has enriched us with a wealth of knowledge on the business elite that we have almost ignored. The literature cited herein seems to show that the structure of this small group called the elite has numerous effects on the world economy. In the opposite direction, globalization will also affect the elite, as we are now facing a globalization of education of the elite. In its first wave, globalization of education will probably create a new collection of elites and elicit some changes, yet the unity and uniformity of the elite will be even greater, not only at the national level, but also at the global level. National elites will be replaced with a worldwide elite, along with uniformity in culture and education. We will face an international technocratic elite with its own norms, ethos, and identity, as well as its private clubs like the Davos World Economic Forum - a transnational oligarchy.

elite, education, economic growth, social mobility, institutions

Abstract:
This paper studies the effects of interest rate restrictions on loan allocation. In 1714, the British government tightened the usury laws, reducing the maximum permissible interest rate from 6 to 5 percent. A sample of individual loan transactions from a goldsmith bank allows us to examine how interest rate restrictions affected loan allocation. Average loan size and minimum loan size increased strongly. Access to credit for those of noble origin improved, while it worsened for those with less "social capital." Collateralized credits, which had accounted for a declining share of total lending, returned to their former role of prominence. While we have no direct evidence that loans were misallocated, the discontinuity in loan receipts makes this likely. Our results suggest that the usury laws distorted credit markets significantly. We find no evidence that they offered a form of Pareto-improving social insurance.

Credit rationing, financial repression, usury laws, natural experiment, lending decisions

Abstract:
The reply by Kehoe and Prescott restates their position but does not answer the criticism made in my review of their book (Temin 2008). I argued that the general equilibrium model of economic growth to study income fluctuations does not lead to a useful research program; the use of closed-economy models to understand the world problems of the 1930s and the Latin-American problems of the 1980s is not helpful; and the authors using Kehoe and Prescott's recommended approach do not use data with the care standard in other branches of economics. I stand by those criticisms.

Depressions, economic fluctuations, general equilibrium models

Abstract:
Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s. American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were poor substitutes for one another. The Walker tariff of 1846, for example, reduced the duties on cotton textiles from nearly 70 percent to 25 percent and imports soared as a result, but there was little change in domestic production. Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.

International trade, tariff, U.S. History, cotton

Abstract:
This history of the Great Depression was prepared for The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. It describes real and imagined causes of the Depression, bank failures and deflation, the Fed and the gold standard, the start of recovery, the first New Deal, and the second New Deal. I argue that adherence to the gold standard caused the Depression, that abandoning gold started recovery, and that several of the New Deal measures adopted in the recovery lasted in good order for half a century.

Abstract:
We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of information and the addressing of problems of informational asymmetries representing central problems for firm- and relationship design. Our analysis emphasizes the endogenous adoption of coordination mechanisms in the context of evolving but specific operating conditions and opportunities. This naturally gives rise both to change and to heterogeneity in the population of coordination mechanisms to be observed in use at any moment in time. In discussing the changes in the population of mechanisms over time, we seek to avoid the tendency, exemplified by Chandler's work but characteristic of the field, to see history of adoption in teleological rather than evolutionary perspective. We see a richer set of mechanisms in play than is conventional and a more complex historical process at work, in particular a process in which hierarchical institutions have both risen and, more recently, declined in significance.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract:
I argue in this paper that we do not pay teachers enough to get high-quality applicants. The reasons we find ourselves in this inferior equilibrium are rooted in our history. Most American teachers are and have been women; we have not accommodated to the increasing opportunities for women in the economy today. Schools are locally funded, and we also have not accommodated to the declining effectiveness of the property tax. The result of having low-quality teachers is that current reforms sub-optimize with the current stock of teachers and therefore result at best in only small gains in educational quality. We are in danger of losing the educational advantage that the United States enjoyed in the 20th century.

Abstract:
Sears Roebuck and Co. faced similar challenges in the 1920s and the 1980s. On the strength of the early period's strategic investment decisions, the company grew into the nation's largest retailer and a pervasive factor in the economy. In the later period, unanswered challenges nearly destroyed the company. We analyze the elements that contributed to the success in the 1920s and to the near disaster in the 1980s and place them in a broader and more systematic context. We argue that successful innovations combine a focus on an attractive market with an exploitation and even enhancement of a firm's existing competitive strengths.

Abstract:
There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description, represented by the views of Ashton and Landes, sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has been challenged by Crafts and Harley who see the Industrial Revolution as a much narrower phenomenon, as the result of technical change in a few industries. This paper presents a test of these views using the Ricardian model of international trade with many goods. British trade data are used to implement the test and discriminate between the two views of the Industrial Revolution.

Abstract:
There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has been challenged by Crafts and Harley who see the Industrial Revolution as the result of technical change in only a few industries. This paper presents a test of these views using the Ricardian model of international trade with many goods. British trade data are used to implement the test and discriminate between the two views of the Industrial Revolution.

Abstract:
This paper surveys the economy of New England in the half-century following 1830. It begins by discussing reasons why manufacturing grew in the United States and especially in New England. The paper surveys the outputs of New England industry, particularly machine tools and textiles. It then discusses the inputs to industry. Women formed an important part of the New England labor force; the histories of Boston and Lowell illustrate the increasing urbanization of the labor force. Capital for industry was raised both through formal credit instruments (for large enterprises) and through local banks (for smaller ones).

Abstract:
This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has changed. As in the earlier study, the business elite is compared to a" sample of political leaders. I find that democratization of the business elite has progressed only" slightly in the past century, nowhere near as much as democratization of the political elite. " Despite the myriad things that have changed in America in the last century the business elite appears recognizably the same.

Abstract:
If in general, financial deepening aids economic growth, then financial repression should be harmful. We use a natural experiment - the change in the English usury laws in 1714 - to analyse the effects of interest rate restrictions. Based on a sample of individual loan transactions, we demonstrate how the reduction of the legal maximum rate of interest affected the supply and demand for credit. Average loan size and minimum loan size increased strongly, and access to credit worsened for those with little 'social capital'. While we have no direct evidence that loans were misallocated, the discontinuity in loan receipts makes this highly likely. We conclude that financial repression can undermine the positive effects of financial deepening; Britain's disappointing growth during the period 1750-1850 may partly reflect the effects of harmful credit market regulation.

Economic development, banking, financial repression, usury laws, credit rationing, natural experiments, lending decisions

Abstract:
Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s. American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were poor substitutes for one another. The Walker tariff of 1846, for example, reduced the duties on cotton textiles from nearly 70 percent to 25 percent and imports soared as a result, but there was little change in domestic production. Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.

Abstract:
This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to discrimination on the job or to principal-agent factors. The most likely explanation is that this demographic group makes the best business managers. I suggest that this in turn is not because they are inherently superior, but because they have had access to superior education, a result of past discrimination.

Abstract:
Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century private loan market balanced through quantity rationing. Over 90% of all loans were made at the maximum permissible lending rate, as set by the usury rate. Hence, earlier investigations such as the one by Mirowski, et al., could not undertake a valid examination of the crowding-out hypothesis. Using a unique set of observations on lending volume at a London goldsmith bank, Hoare's, we document the impact of wartime financing on private credit markets. Whenever public borrowing rose above trend, private lending declined markedly. We conclude that there is considerable evidence that government borrowing, especially during wartime, crowded out private credit, and that the magnitude of the effect is important enough to explain at least partly why British growth during the period 1750-1850 was relatively slow.

Crowding-out, british industrial revolution, growth, finance, credit rationing

Abstract:
Rome was an exceedingly large city at the start of the Roman Empire, and it required massive grain imports to feed its population. We argue that Roman merchants organized these imports and that they used a variety of mechanisms to deal with the informational problems of long-distance trade at that time. They used general institutions of Rome, such as its legal and social structures, as well as specific mercantile institutions, such as contracts, companies, and invoices. They exploited information in the Roman social structure as well as in the facilities for trade. This combination of social and economic institutions enabled Roman merchants to operate on as large a scale as any other pre-industrial merchant group.

Abstract:

Abstract:
The financial revolution improved the British government's ability to borrow, and thus its ability to wage war. North and Weingast argued that it also permitted private parties to borrow more cheaply and widely. We test these inferences with evidence from a London bank. We confirm that private bank credit was cheap in the early eighteenth century, but we argue that it was not available widely. Importantly, the government reduced the usury rate in 1714, sharply reducing the circle of private clients that could be served profitably.