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In the early nineteenth century, the Suffolk Bank established a regional banknote clearing network. Despite the benefits offered, many of the system's member banks were unhappy with it and quickly affiliated with an alternative clearing network as soon as it appeared. The reason for the quick abandonment of the Suffolk system was that it failed to price its network clearing services efficiently. Pressured by large Boston banks to shift the cost of the system to small country banks, the Suffolk engaged in inefficient cross-subsidization. Once a competitor emerged that priced efficiently, it drove the Suffolk from the market.

Between 1890 and 1930, the development of refrigerated rail transportation enabled a national US apple industry to emerge. Apples were shipped over long distances, and sold in the terminal market on consignment or FOP, or in the auction market. There were frequent disputes over quality, caused by the long distances between buyers and sellers, the natural decline in apple quality over time, and because farmer transactions relied on government quality standards and inspection services. Evidence suggests that these institutions emerged in response to contract-enforcement and quality problems.

This article uses roll-call voting and constituency data to provide an improved understanding of how and why the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 divided the Democratic Party. The evidence suggests, first, that the predominance of southerners among Democrats who opposed the FLSA resulted in part from the widespread disfranchisement of law-wage workers in the South and ,second, that Democratic opposition to the FLSA in the House of Representatives reflected a weakening of the coalition that had passed so much legislation during the earlier years of the New Deal.

The weather-information problem faced by settlers of semi-arid regions of the Great Plains hindered their attempts to adapt their crops, techniques,a nd farm sizes. Episodes of homestead settlement and collapse in western Kansas in 1893-1894 and in eastern Montana in 1917-1921 are examined. A Bayesian learning model indicates how new climate information was incrementally incorporated to revise views of agricultural prospects. Primary data show homesteaders' lagged response to new drought information and illustrate drought's differential impact on small farms. Dryframing doctrine, despite its optimistic claims, was an imperfect response to drought. Indeed, some dryfarming practices hastened homestead failure.

Clothing in colonial and antebellum America is discussed in as it relates to the role of capitalism in American politics. Issues include the revolutionary character of capitalism and capitalism's control of American life.

This article presents a broad overview of U.S. economic history which identifies a next stage of feminist economic transformation. It identifies three semihistorical stages in the development of the economic self: gender polarization, gender freedom, and gender integration. Contemporary economic values, practices, and institutions--which were constructed on gender polarization between masculine paid economy-centered work and feminine unpaid family-centered work--are currently being undermined by the process of gender integration as individuals of both sexes straddle economy and family, masculinity and femininity, and as social movements organize to inject feminine caring into an increasingly heartless masculine economy. This process is leading to the healing of individuals, male-female relationships, and economic and social institutions, constituting a revolutionary new stage of feminist-inspired change. JEL classification: J16; D13 Keywords: Gender; United States; History

The dominant causal relation between US federal taxation and spending runs from taxes to spending from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Patterns of stability are produced by this underlying causal order.

This article examines the impact of what is undoubtedly the most important monetary regime change in U.S. history: the founding of the Federal Reserve System. We find, using a (G)ARCH model, a significant reduction in interest rate uncertainty following the founding of the Fed. Additionally, we show that the passage of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908, another significant change in policy, also led to a reduction in interest rate uncertainty. These results are robust to alternative interest rate models, as well as to incorporating the impact of other events important to financial markets in our sample.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the regions of the United States went from a set of relatively isolated regional economies to an integrated national economy. Economic integration, as well as long-ran secular changes in the economic structure associated with economic growth, played an important role in determining U.S. regional industrial structures. Moreover, although differences in regional industrial structures do not explain all the variations in regional income per capita, they played an important role in causing U.S. regional incomes to diverge and converge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This article proposes a unified framework for studying the greenback-gold price during the U.S. suspension of convertibility from 1862 to 1879.The gold price is viewed as a floating exchange rate, with a fixed destination given by gold standard parity because of the prospect of resumption. This perspective is tested using daily data for the entire period, and the effect of news during and after the Civil War is measured. New evidence of a decline in the volatility of gold returns after the Resumption Act of 1875 provides statistical support for the importance of expectations of resumption.

Women engaged primarily in the provision of domestic services for family members make important contributions to total output. This article provides estimates of the size and sectoral allocation of the nonmarket household work force in the United States between 1800 and 1860. Those estimates are then used as a basis for several alternative imputations of the value of these women's work, which modify the historical picture of economic growth over this period.

The American 'Empire' is a fine interpretive essay on the sources and limits of United States influence in world politics since 1945. Geir Lundestad links issues of politics, economics and security, emphasizing the importance of local politics in determining the extent of US influence. In his view, US power has declined in relative terms since 1950, but the United States remains the world's strongest state. Lundestad's balanced and nuanced analysis is not aided, however, by use of the phrase 'empire' to describe United States hegemony, since 'empire' obscures rather than illuminates the differences in form of rule between the United States and other Great Powers, such was Great Britain in the nineteenth century or the Soviet Union in the twentieth.

With one party in charge of the presidency and the other one in charge of Congress, how are American voters supposed to allocate credit and blame for the government's economic performance? The following solutions are proposed and tested: Hung Jury, where voters refuse to render an economic judgment on either president or Congress; Split Verdict, where voters reach separate judgments depending on whichever party is in control of a given branch; President Liable, where the electorate solves the responsibility problem by singling out the President and absolving Congress; and Congress Liable, with the roles of president and Congress reversed. The results show that the President Liable model wins easily under varying configurations of divided government as well as economic conditions. Divided government poses no noticeable obstacle for retrospective voting on the economy.

Expanded scientific activity is thought to benefit national economic development through improved labor force capacities and the creation of new knowledge and technology. However, scientific research activity expands as a global process and reflects the penetration of societies by a general rationalistic world culture. The authors point out that scientific expansion and the accompanying cultural penetration legitimate a broad progressive agenda of social amelioration (e.g., by identifying environmental and health problems, and social welfare and human rights issues) that can result in regulation and direct constraints on productive economic activity in the short term. Thus, science can be seen as encouraging a trade-off between short-term economic growth and broader (and longer-term) social development. The effects of dimensions of scientific infrastructure on national economic growth are examined over the 1970-1990 period. Cross-national analyses show that the size of a nation's scientific labor force and training system has a positive effect on economic development, supporting conventional theories. However, indicators of national involvement in scientific research activity show negative effects on economic growth. Corollary analyses show that this negative effect is partially explained by the expansion of scientific activity into more socially relevant domains (e.g., medicine, environmental sciences, etc.), thus supporting the main arguments.

Frank Levy is the Daniel Rose Professor of Urban Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the author of The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and [...]