Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century.

Economica ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 29 (113) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Charlotte J. Erickson

1970 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 602-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd J. Mercer

Land was the resource that nineteenth-century America possessed in greatest abundance. A large part of the land was initially in the public domain and was transferred to private ownership in the course of the century. Land policy, therefore, had the potential for creating significant and long lasting effects on the American economy—on the rate of settlement of the West, the distribution of income, the rate of economic growth. A substantial body of literature, much of it severely critical, has developed concerning the economic effects of nineteenth-century American land policy. Unfortunately, the criticisms often rest primarily on tales of corruption and thievery, rather than on economic analysis. Certainly many of the stories are true, but they represent an insufficient basis for evaluating the economic effects of land policy. A detailed economic analysis of individual policies is required.





1962 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Fishlow


1968 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-634
Author(s):  
Thomas Weiss

Approximately two years ago Stanley Lebergott took issue with the finding “that the rise of the railroads was relatively unimportant” to the American economy of the nineteenth century (p. 438). Lebergott dis-missed the low estimates of social savings as “startling but uninteresting,” and offered an alternative estimate of railroad importance. He asked the important question “by how much the railroad reduced real costs of transport from those that would have prevailed under a regime of wagoners and boatmen” (p. 441). He approached the answer by way of two other questions. Given cost and technological data, “what was the maximum volume of goods that could be distributed per year by a mile of canal and by a mile of railroad where both could reasonably be built? And how great was that volume per dollar of investment?” (p. 422). Using nineteenth-century data in his inimitably artistic manner, Lebergott fashioned an answer suggesting that the consequences of railroad construction were “surely the stuff of significant economic change” (p. 466).



2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 285-324
Author(s):  
Wei You

Small firms dominated the American economy in the nineteenth century, and they still dominate in many developing economies today. This paper tests whether geographic market segmentation due to underdeveloped intracity transportation technology precludes the emergence of large retail/wholesale stores. I exploit the natural experiment of Boston’s rapid electrification from its previous horse-drawn streetcar system, which occurred between 1889 and 1896. Analyzing newly digitized data, I find that rail-connected locations experienced a sharp decline in the share of sole proprietorships among food retail/wholesale establishments after the electrification relative to off-rail locations. Changes in market access due to streetcar electrification can explain this effect. (JEL L25, L81, L92, N71, N91, R41)



1961 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Cochran


1974 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Madison

Professor Madison examines the formative decades of an important new industry in the nineteenth-century American economy. Overcoming a wide range of problems and challenges, firms such as the Bradstreet and the Dun agencies became established enterprises by the end of the century primarily because they effectively met new needs in a changing business environment.



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