Research in Economic History: Volume 21

The Great Depression reached a turning point in the currency crises of 1931, and the German banking and currency crisis was a critical event whose causes are still debated. We demonstrate in this paper that the crisis was primarily domestic in origin; that it was a currency crisis rather than a banking crisis; and that the failure was more political than economic. German banks failed in 1931, but the problem was not primarily with them. Instead, the crisis was a failure of political will in a time of turmoil that induced a currency crisis.

The influence of the household balance sheet, the supply of credit, and uncertainty on consumer spending during the early years of the Great Depression in the USA are assessed within a unified life-cycle consumption function framework. Income uncertainty played the dominant role in the spending declines of 1930 and 1932. The depletion of households' financial assets contributed modestly to the consumption falls in 1931–1932. Indebtedness, the severe penalties surrounding installment debt default, and the supply of credit had little effect on the consumer spending slump.

The assumption today is that the Federal Reserve stands behind the financial system in case of a catastrophic shock. There has been little research on how the payments system functioned during economic catastrophes prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. This paper examines the 1906 San Francisco earthquake when a private sector response was required after disaster occurred. The research question addressed is how well the private sector responded when there was a large external shock to the payments system such as an earthquake. The San Francisco Clearinghouse is examined as a case study.

Industry-specific minimum wages in Australia have long been set by government tribunals. Although creating microeconomic inefficiency, the system may facilitate incomes policies, such as the 10% wage cut in 1931. This paper uses personnel records from the Union Bank of Australia to examine the effectiveness of the 1931 policy. It is shown that the bank responded to the cut by increasing the frequency of payments over the minimum rates, and that between 1924–1934 tenure-adjusted real wages were essentially constant. Finally, it is shown that the bank maintained a policy of real wage shielding as part of its internal labor market.

In this essay I use the Mills-Muth monocentric model to examine the impact of urban decay on land values in Cleveland, Ohio. Using the bid-rent surfaces generated from the estimation of the Mills-Muth model, I calculate aggregate assessed land values for the entire city of Cleveland as well as for several of its neighborhoods. My analysis confirms the story told by historians: Cleveland experienced severe urban decay after World War II. However, while land values fell precipitously between 1950 and 1980, most of the decline occurred during the 1970s. The magnitude and the timing of the decline in land values during the early 1970s are difficult to explain, but my results challenge Cleveland historian Robert Whipple Green's assertion that dramatic demographic changes in Cleveland's East Side neighborhoods caused these neighborhoods to decay.

The primary explanation for the marked rise in real wages in both England and Flanders, from the later fourteenth to mid fifteenth centuries, was a combination of institutional wage stickiness and deflation. In both countries, nominal wages had indeed risen after the Black Death (1348), but so had the cost of living, with a rampant inflation that lasted until the late 1370s in England and the late 1380s in Flanders. Thereafter, consumer prices fell sharply but money wages did not - or, in Flanders, not as much as did consumer prices. The other thesis of this paper is that these later medieval price movements were fundamentally monetary in nature.

McCloskey's model of medieval English agriculture shapes the debate over the origins and persistence of the open fields. This essay deconstructs McCloskey's often-cited analysis and demonstrates that McCloskey's assumptions contradict her conclusions. McCloskey's claims concerning the costs of various methods of mitigating risk are inconsistent with her vision of autarkic villages where scattering protected peasants from adverse agricultural shocks. Instead, McCloskey's claims corroborate an alternative markets-plus-morals view of medieval English villages. Correcting McCloskey's erroneous inferences resurrects long forgotten explanations for the persistence of the open fields and suggests a new agenda for the study of medieval English agriculture.

Over fifty million people emigrated from Europe between 1815 and 1930. Only a small fraction of these emigrants have been studied using data collected in their homelands. This paper presents a new sample of European emigrants who migrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. The emigrants are linked to data describing the socioeconomic characteristics of their home villages. These data are promising for studying many issues in the migration literature, particularly migration behavior and the causes of emigration.