From the end of the War of 1812 until the Civil War the New Bedford whaling fleet grew spectacularly; thereafter it declined, equally spectacularly. By the end of the century New Bedford's day was over. During the 88 years of this period, the technical configuration of the fleet, the hunting...

Recent theoretical research in open-economy macroeconomics has emphasized the connection between a country's current account and the intertemporal savings and investment choices of its households, firms, and governments. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the permanent income...

Has economic progress increased the relative earnings of females to males over the long run? Evidence on trends in the earnings gap for the last four decades appears to run counter to this hypothesis. Numerous data sources are used in this paper to piece together a 170-year history of the...

This paper discusses a portion of our work linking data on the agriculture sector in the United States and Canada. The purpose of this work is to explore the evolution of gains in agricultural productivity in the two countries during the post-WWII period. Comparable data has been developed for...

Changes in the skill differential are often used by economic historians to proxy changes in income inequality. According to Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert, American skill differentials rose sharply between 1820 and 1860, which they interpret as increasing income inequality. Using a large,...

In this paper we calculate and analyze the automobile industries cost and productivity experience during the 1970 's in Canada, the U.S.and Japan. Utilizing an econometric cost function methodology, we are able to isolate the major source of short-run disequilibrium in this industry-variations'...

This paper -- prepared for and presented at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth -- describes a set of seven capital stock estimates for the U.S., distributed at decennial intervals, 1840 through 1900.The estimates link with Raymond Goldsmith's work on the twentieth...

This paper examines the international financial relations of the interwar period to see what light this experience sheds on current concerns over international policy coordination. The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first part considers the role for policy coordination as viewed by...

Economic and social historians have traditionally been concerned to measure changes in the income and welfare of populations in the past.Until recently, however, they have not recognized that anthropometric data, such as evidence on the average height achieved by a population at a particular...

The pace and pattern of wealth accumulation by Southern blacks in the period before World War I is of central importance to the historical evolution of black/white income differences. This paper extends recent work by Robert Higgs, who used data on assessed wealth for Georgia to study the...