Prelims

Half Title Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Series Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Series Editors: Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott

Title Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY VOLUME 34

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

EDITED BY

CHRISTOPHER HANES

Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA

SUSAN WOLCOTT

Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78756-582-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-581-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-583-8 (Epub)

ISSN: 0363-3268 (Series)

List of Contributors

Introduction

Research in Economic History is a refereed journal, specializing in economic history, in the form of a book. We publish articles that follow the standard formats of economics journals, but we can also accommodate longer pieces, historical narratives, and articles that primarily present newly constructed data sets.

In this volume, Molly Ball presents and analyzes newly constructed indices of nominal wages, the cost of living, and real wages in São Paulo, Brazil, over 1891–1930. This is an important addition to basic historical data on one of the most important cities in South America.

Howard Bodenhorn uses surveys of working-class households in late nineteenth-century New Jersey, along with other information, to study the motivations of working-class savers and the institutions in which they invested their savings – mainly life insurance companies, fraternal societies, savings banks and building, and loan associations.

Gregori Galofré-Vilà, Andrew Hinde, and Aravinda Meera Guntupalli present a newly constructed longitudinal series on heights in England over the last 2000 years. They use the series to assess the credibility of other estimated measures of well-being in England, including gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and real wages. Further, they compare the height series to other series measuring health.

Mary Rodgers and James E. Payne present a novel view and new evidence about the famous American financial Panic of 1907. Traditional accounts of the panic give a large role to the failure of the Heinze copper corner in precipitating runs on New York banks. Modern literature notes that the panic followed monetary-policy tightening by the Bank of England and other European central banks. Rodgers and Payne argue that the copper corner failed because the monetary-policy tightening caused a drop in prices of copper, among other commodities.

Christian Stohr uses the wealth of available Swiss data on agriculture and employment to create GDP measures for subregions in Switzerland. He uses these data to argue that aggregate inequality in Switzerland was low in the initial push to industrialization because there were multiple, similar centers industrializing simultaneously, thus mitigating inequality across regions.