An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and...

An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and...

An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and...

Understanding long-term changes in human well-being is central to understanding the consequences of economic development. An extensive anthropometric literature purports to show that heights in the United States declined between the 1830s and the 1890s, which is when the US economy...

Previous studies of entry under New York's free banking law of 1838 have generated conflicting results. This article shows that different measures of entry lead to different conclusions about the competitive effects of the law. Measured by the entry of new banks, New York's free banking law led...

One traditional and oft-repeated explanation of the political impetus behind free banking connects the rise of Jacksonian populism and a rejection of the privileges associated with corporate chartering. A second views free banking as an ill-informed inflationist, pro business response to the...

This paper investigates the economics of pauper apprenticeship in antebellum Maryland and several results emerge. Contrary to some earlier interpretations, the system did not arbitrarily indent poor children. Court officials negotiated contracts that reflected an apprentice's productivity;...

Do efficient financial markets and institutions promote economic growth? Have they done so in the past? In this essay, to be included in the Handbook of Finance and Development (edited by Thorsten Beck and Ross Levine), I survey a large and diverse historical literature that explores the...

Limited liability is a defining feature of the modern corporation, but it was not always so. By the early 1850s about one-half of all states imposed double liability on bank shareholders. This paper shows that double liability was adopted as deposits increased relative to banknotes and in...

Prison overcrowding is a perennial problem and several states are under court order to reduce crowding. The long-term solution to crowding has been more prisons. The short-term solution is early release. Early release programs can be effective when they balance the savings of reduced prison...