Research in Economic History: Volume 32

At the beginning of the 20th century, three intertwined ambitions drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll call votes over the past century with a Random Utility Model (Manski, 1977) and conclude that economics mattered. So did ideology, but not uniformly. After World War II, the pro-environment vote which had been conservative shifted to being liberal. All these votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset’s physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long-term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socioeconomic and geophysical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community’s resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users’ current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand, colonial governments experimented with other ways to anchor their paper monies to real values in the economy. These mechanisms included tax-redemption, land-backed loans, sinking funds, interest-bearing notes, and legal tender laws. I assess and explain the structure and performance of these mechanisms. This was monetary experimentation on a grand scale.

The substantial resources devoted to warfare in modern times might explain the increasing relevance that military spending has acquired in social sciences. In this regard, the so-called defence economics has extensively studied the main determinants of military spending and its main consequences in terms of economic performance and institutional transformations. However, one of the main problems for comparative analysis on the causes and effects of military spending is the lack of long-term homogeneous and comparable data in international panel datasets. This paper contributes to fill in this gap by providing new military spending data on Spain from 1850 to 2009 based on NATO methodological criterion. It provides total military spending estimates as well as economic and administrative disaggregated figures for most of the period. These data allow reliable international comparisons while also providing new quantitative evidence to better understand the military history of Spain in modern times.

This paper is the first to use the individual level, longitudinal catch-up growth of boys and girls in a historical population to measure their relative deprivation. The data is drawn from two government schools, the Marcella Street Home (MSH) in Boston, MA (1889–1898), and the Ashford School of the West London School District (1908–1917). The paper provides an extensive discussion of the two schools including the characteristics of the children, their representativeness, selection bias and the conditions in each school. It also provides a methodological introduction to measuring children’s longitudinal catch-up growth. After analysing the catch-up growth of boys and girls in the schools, it finds that there were no substantial differences between the catch-up growth by gender. Thus, these data suggest that there were not major health disparities between boys and girls in late-nineteenth-century America and early-twentieth-century Britain.

This paper examines the effect of bank expansion on credit access and terms of credit in early America. The bank records from Plymouth Bank, Massachusetts and the Census records provide detailed information on borrowers, endorser, types and terms of loans, and borrower characteristics. The results show that the introduction of new banks did broaden credit access. However, after competition was introduced, the Bank focused more on short-term bills of exchange. In other words, the Bank shifted its emphasis from long-term accommodation paper to short-term bills of exchange.