This paper analyzes the trade-off between risk and incentives in the share contracts of the American whaling industry. Using a newly collected panel of 5378 individuals who sailed on more than 1000 whaling voyages from 1855-68, the response of sailors' compensation to an increase in risk is...

We investigate the wealth effects of takeovers in the mining industry of the German Ruhr district between 1896 and 1913. We employ event study methodology and use a new data set that covers stock prices of joint-stock mining companies and information on share prices of Gewerkschaften, an...

In 1955 fewer than 2% of the nation's residences had air conditioning; by 1980 over half were air conditioned, and over a quarter had central air. This paper attempts to explain the growth and the geographic differences in the prevalence of residential air conditioning from the mid fifties to...

This paper develops and estimates models of family and sex-specific emigration, as well as the sex composition of this emigration, from 12 European source countries to the U.S. for the period 1870-1910. The models are based on the distinction between economic migrants (males, single females, and...

By relating strike outcomes and durations to the value of the disputed wage change and to the cost to each side of continuing the strike, this paper tests the hypothesis that the war of attrition with asymmetric information model of strikes accurately describes the characteristics of strikes...

Much of the puzzle of underissuance of national bank notes can be resolved for the period 1880-1900 (the period when detailed, bank-level data are available) by disaggregating, taking account of regulatory limits, and considering differences in banks' opportunity costs cross-sectionally and over...