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The state of the US federal finance after winning the War for Independence, which gave the government debt and an empire of land, is examined. Findings show that the federal government had to irrevocably and permanently default on its continental dollars in 1790 to gain a solvent net worth status. The policies placed by the federal government to attain solvency are discussed.

Controlling for SAT scores, college major, gender, and state of residence, university students were more likely to have joined a fraternity or sorority if they had come from in state and had higher verbal SAT scores, but lower math SAT scores, the opposite of what simple uncontrolled averages indicate. Controlling for the same variables, fraternity and sorority members suffered from 1 to 10 percent lower cumulative GPAs than non-Greek students. This negative effect was most pronounced for small fraternities and weakest for sororities.

The impact of the United States dollar union on the financial revolution and American economic growth are analyzed. The opportunity cost of such decision is examined.

Convicts account for at least one-quarter of British migration to mid-eighteenth-century America. Their transportation to and disposal in America was essentially an experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice. A model of this trade is developed that yields testable implications regarding the relative distributional moments of convict auction prices, the size of shipper profits, and how convicts were selected for transportation. Quantitative evidence is assembled to test these implications and to measure the labor value of criminality. The results support the model and are used to explain the political economy of British penal policy.

Laws regarding indentured servants in colonial America required giving them various goods when their contract was completed, possibly as a means to prevent early departure and reliance on welfare. However, a more likely reason for this innovative provision was due to interaction between market, custom, and law.

Europeans stopped using servitude to finance passage to America sometime in the early nineteenth century, but exactly when and why immigrant servitude disappeared is a mystery. Hypotheses abound, but no consensus has emerged nor have scholars tested hypotheses. In this study, quantitative evidence for the final sixty years of immigrant servitude establishes when and why it disappeared. Servitude did not end because of insufficient demand, legal restrictions, or declines in passage fares. It ended because superior methods of financing migration developed. Chance historical events, however, determined the exact timing of the end.

The increasing number of wars during the age of Queen Anne encouraged an abrupt transition from emigrant European servants to African slaves in the southern states of the US. Servant labor declined due to inefficient servant supply caused by military recruitment and a decrease in servant demand due to lack of exports. Slave labor originated in Chesapeake and this became the primary cause of North-South conflicts.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

The details of the panel discussions held to identify the three best dissertations on North American economic history for the Nevins prize are presented.

The quantity of specie in circulation is estimated using the market transaction data, which provides the first comprehensive measure of a colony's money supply and to retest the quantity theory of money and measure output growth using the equation of exchange. It was found that output growth is dependent on periodization and the extent that rising commercialization increased the velocity of circulation.

The trend in height among indentured servants during the 18th century is examined, focusing on the reliability of height estimates. Topics include nutrition, Malthusian theories of population, variation in statistics from different colonies, misuse of average age of subjects, and data pool from which statistics are drawn.

Assesses theoretical frameworks that have dominated the social science contribution to the history of Pacific labor trade. Usefulness of the economic theory; Comparison of the economic theory and Marxian theory; Discussion on the origins of methodological conflicts; Obstacle in the communication and practice of scientific inquiry.