Hard-to-find articles

A more perfect union: regional interest rats in the United States, 1880-1960

Abstract: This chapter revisits regional bank lending rates in the post-Civil war United States. The two principal findings are that regional interest rates converged earlier and more fully than previously believed, and that persistent differentials were not the consequence of poorly designed regulations but rather persistent differences in the risks of lending across regions. Risks differed because the regional economies differed by industrial mix, the risks inherent in different types of agriculture, and other structural factors. 

Anglo-American Financial Systems: Institutions and Markets in the Twentieth Century. Michael D. Bordo and Richard Sylla, eds. Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1995.

The state-level interest rate series are available as an Excel file in the Data section of this site.

Later-life realizations of Maryland's mid-nineteenth-century pauper apprentices

Abstract: Children Bound to Labor (2009) revealed the ubiquity and idiosyncratic nature of pauper apprenticeship across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Despite local and regional differences, pauper apprenticeship served the three related purposes of poor relief, social control, and training for later-life economic independence. Most existing studies focus on whether and to what extent the system achieved the first two objectives. Less is known about later-life outcomes of pauper apprentices. This chapter offers insights into the system’s contribution to the third objective by linking more than 2,700 young males apprenticed by family members and by poor relief administrators in Maryland between 1820 and 1860 to the federal censuses of 1860 and 1870.  Compared to boys apprenticed by family members, pauper apprentices were indentured at younger ages, but they were otherwise promised similar training, education, and freedom dues during their apprenticeships. In later life, however, pauper apprentices were less likely to be literate and conditional on marriage had fewer children. There were small differences in skilled employment, wealth, and mobility. A second well-documented feature of pauper apprenticeship was its racialized implementation. Maryland’s poor blacks worked in less skilled occupations, were less literate, and amassed notably less wealth. If the system is to be judged by equitable treatment and sufficient training for later-life economic independence, it is not clear that the system succeeded. It took poor black children off the public dole but did not prepare them for more than scraping by in later-life.

Private seeking of private monopoly in early American banking

Abstract: In early nineteenth-century America, banks were chartered through legislative acts of incorporation. Most bank charters established local monopolies so that charters created economic rents. The public choice approach holds that governmental creation of artificial rents invites rent seeking and welfare losses, and more so the larger the potential rents. This chapter provides estimates of rents and potential welfare losses for Pennsylvania. The results suggest that local monopoly rents amounted to approximately 1% to 1.5% of gross domestic product. Pennsylvania adopted a number of policies, including price ceilings and tax policies, which reduced welfare losses and redistributed some of the rents. The chapter concludes with reflections on the evolving political economy of chartering policy, and why Pennsylvania was slow to reform its practices.