Introduction to “Enterprising America: Businesses, , and

Markets in Historical Perspective”

By William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo*

May 2014

*Terence E. Adderley Jr. Professor of Economics, Vanderbilt University, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research; Professor of Economics, Boston University, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. This is the introductory chapter to the NBER conference volume, Enterprising America: Businesses, Banks, and Credit Markets in Historical Perspective. The conference was held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, on December 14, 2013. Conference support from the NBER and Vanderbilt University’s Adderley Chair and Douglas Grey gift is gratefully acknowledged.

1

Introduction

The American economy’s ascendance from a colonial outpost into one of the world’s most sophisticated and productive economies was an event of singular historical importance.

From a global perspective, the American economy became a major force driving international trade, migration, capital flows, and business cycles. Although international comparisons of production are imprecise for the nineteenth century, it is clear that the United States rose from a peripheral to a primary in the world’s economic order by 1900 (Kindleberger 1996,

Landes 1998, Maddison 2001).1 Even as the world’s economic output grew at an unprecedented rate, the American economy’s growth surpassed all others.

From a domestic perspective, there is no single metric that captures the scope of economic change and its implications for the American people, but salient features of the transformation are clearly visible. Between 1800 and 1900, the share of the labor force in agriculture declined by half (Carter 2006, p. 2-18), coinciding with the steady rise of towns and cities. At the same time, the geographic center of the population shifted dramatically westward, from near Baltimore to near Indianapolis (U.S. Department of Commerce 2011). Within the manufacturing sector, the rise of the factory system and subsequent business consolidations led to “huge corporations mass producing standardized products for a national market” (Atack and

Bateman 2006, p. 4-575). This was encouraged and facilitated by the new network of railways, which sharply cut inter-regional transportation costs and physically tied national markets together into a large, open, commercial space. Finally, the development of the banking and

1 Maddison (2001, Appendix B), for example, estimated that between 1820 and 1913, the two benchmark dates closest to the start and end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. share of global GDP increased from below 2 percent to nearly 20 percent.

2 financial sector, despite several crises, provided credit and capital to firms, farms, and consumers, thereby fueling economic growth while in turn benefiting from it.

A basic starting point for understanding the history of American economic growth is to model total output as a function of technology and “factors of production,” including labor, capital, and other resources. With certain assumptions and macroeconomic data, technological improvements and additions to the stock of factors can account for economic growth. Although this kind of accounting can provide a clear and quantitative view of the sources of American growth, it only scratches the story’s surface because it does not address how technological change and factor accumulation were actually accomplished or why so much of it was accomplished in this particular time and place.

In the broadest terms, American economic growth was the product of successful enterprise, by which we mean purposeful, typically profit-seeking, initiatives to provide goods and services to markets. These initiatives were pursued within a framework of laws and institutions that set the ground rules for the organization and operation of economic entities.

Effective laws and institutions form the foundation, if not the motivation, for modern economic growth. Ideally, they are designed to encourage enterprise while also constraining undesirable behaviors, such as those associated with principal-agent problems in corporate governance or the powers of the state itself.

Enterprises come in many different forms and structures, depending in part on the nature of the productive activity and the state of technology and in part on the laws and institutions that govern them. Within the framework of laws and institutions, businesses interact with one another in ways that can be productivity enhancing because they complement one another across

3 sectors, such as banks that provide credit to manufacturers or farmers, or because they compete with one another within sectors, such as firms within manufacturing that vie to offer goods at lower costs or to invent entirely new goods. The ensuing processes of innovation, investment, and factor accumulation connect enterprise-level, profit-seeking initiatives with macro-level economic growth. Because the legal framework in the United States evolved from a deep colonial history and continued to be shaped at the state level throughout the nineteenth century, there is institutional variety across space and time and, in some places, exceptionally detailed enterprise-level data. This history, in turn, provides ample opportunity to study institutions, their evolution, and their ramifications for enterprises’ organization and performance.

Volume Summary

This book presents seven chapters that address topics concerning the historical economic behavior of American firms and financial institutions, primarily in the nineteenth century, and the associated legal and market institutions that shaped their behavior and performance. The chapters are revised versions of papers that were presented at a conference held at Vanderbilt

University in December 2013. The National Bureau of Economic Research and Vanderbilt

University supported the conference.2

The volume commences with an essay by Naomi Lamoreaux that explores differences in the evolution of corporate governance between the United States and other successful capitalist countries that embraced the common law as their fundamental legal framework. The United

States is often held up as an example of how effective economic institutions can shape -run

2 Coinciding with the conference were lunch and evening events celebrating the scholarly contributions of Jeremy Atack, whose research has done much to advance understanding of the historical development of economic enterprises in the United States. These events were sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Adderley Chair and Douglas Grey gift.

4 growth, across all countries in the world and also within the group that adopted the common law.

Yet, in the case of corporate governance, there is a paradox: the laws regulating corporate governance in the United States, which evolved at the state level, were less flexible than the laws that evolved in other common law countries, such as Great Britain, until well into the twentieth century. According to Lamoreaux, this relative inflexibility in the United States was manifested in fewer organizational forms that could be adopted legally and, conditional on the form, greater restrictions on specific features. Nonetheless, among those countries that adopted the common law (or any legal system for that matter), the United States was more successful economically.

This outcome clashes with the usual view in economics that more contractual and organizational flexibility is better than less.

Lamoreaux argues that the cross-county difference in institutions can be traced to differences in political economy. In England and other common law countries, universal manhood suffrage came long after the passage of their incorporation and related laws, whereas in the United States suffrage came first. As a result, in the United States incorporation statutes balanced the interests of the electorate, preventing in Lamoreaux’s words the “‘moneyed elite’ from using their influence to gain unfair advantages over other economic actors.” The first wave of legislation followed on the heels of Jacksonian Democracy and in the wake of the Panic of

1837. It was much more restrictive than what was possible in England at the time. However, as

Lamoreaux points out, the greater institutional flexibility available in England did not necessarily improve economic efficiency; rather, there are many examples of English corporate charters that provided poor internal incentives. By limiting flexibility, laws in the United States may have prevented some sorts of principal-agent problems from becoming more widespread. Lamoreaux

5 develops her argument through a careful case-study of the evolution of incorporation law in

Pennsylvania.

The growth of manufacturing in the nineteenth-century United States was associated with changes in the distribution of firm sizes and production methods (Margo, this volume), but it also signaled change in organizational structure. Much of the historical narrative about these changes emphasizes the rise of the corporate form. In this regard the narrative is heavily influenced by the experience in the New England textile industry, which was among the first industries to make extensive use of incorporation and, through it, to capitalize production. The emergence of the corporate form motivated the classic study by Berle and Means (1932), which pointed to a significant corporate governance issue of “ownership versus control.” In the modern corporation, which they argue emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, ownership is widely dispersed among passive investors, and decisions are instead made by managers whose incentives are not necessarily aligned with shareholders. According to Berle and Means, the modern corporation emerged around the turn of the twentieth century and with it, so did the varied principal-agent problems studied in modern corporate .

However, as Eric Hilt emphasizes in Chapter Two, the economic history of corporate governance in the United States is poorly documented and not well understood. Hilt’s chapter takes an important step towards remedying this deficiency by analyzing a novel source of data, so-called “certificates of condition,” which recorded the nature of firm ownership, lists of stockholders and directors, and some accounting data. Beginning in the 1870s, Massachusetts required all business enterprises in the state to submit these certificates annually. Hilt analyzes the extant certificates for 1875, a year in which Massachusetts also conducted an industrial

6 census, which provides useful correlates for an empirical study of variation in the use of the corporate form.

Hilt’s analysis is in three parts. In the first part, he uses business directories to classify establishments listed in the certificates into the industrial categories given in the 1875

Massachusetts census. Because the census reports the total number of establishments by industry and other industry characteristics, Hilt is able to compute incorporation rates by industry and explore correlations between incorporation rates and average establishment characteristics.

Although the sample sizes are small, he shows that incorporation rates were higher in industries with larger establishments, measured either by capital or total employees. Importantly, he also demonstrates that industries that utilized more steam power, unskilled labor, and fixed capital had higher incorporation rates. These characteristics are associated with factory production, and the patterns suggest that the growth of the factory system and incorporation were closely tied, at least in Massachusetts.

Next, Hilt examines more closely the ownership and governance patterns among corporations. He first looks at textile firms listed on the Boston stock exchange, finding that such firms were widely held and likely under managerial control (rather than owners’ control).

But the textile firms were unusual. The typical manufacturing firm had relatively few shareholders and a high degree of managerial ownership. Turning to the determinants of ownership structure, Hilt finds a positive association between establishment size and the degree to which establishments were widely held. Conditional on size, establishments with characteristics that are associated with factory production had more concentrated ownership.

Hilt argues that, “incorporators and investors [were responding] to the challenges posed by the

7 complex role performed by managers” engaged in factory production “by ensuring that there was adequate ownership incentives to monitor and supervise management”.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced its “industrial revolution.” This revolution started in New England, but by the late antebellum period it had begun to spread throughout the country. Productivity growth was so strong that by the late nineteenth century the typical American manufacturing worker was more productive than his counterpart in England or continental Europe.

Coinciding with the growth of manufacturing was a shift in production from small establishments to larger establishments, that is, from artisan shops to factories (Chandler 1977).

According to the conventional view among economic historians, factories enjoyed a productivity advantage over artisan shops through the exploitation of economies of scale. These economies were achieved through division of labor and mechanization. In turn, the shift towards larger- scale production was enhanced by improved access to capital markets, facilitated in part by legal changes that made it easier for establishments to incorporate (Lamoreaux, this volume; Hilt, this volume); by improvements in transportation that created incentives to expand production and, therefore, implement division of labor or mechanization; and by the development and diffusion of steam power, which provided an expandable source of power and magnified the productivity gains achievable though division of labor alone.

Many economic historians believe that an iconic paper by Kenneth Sokoloff (1984) contains strong evidence in favor of the conventional wisdom. Relying on samples of establishments from the manufacturing censuses of the first half of the nineteenth century,

Sokoloff presented econometric estimates of production functions that support the notion that firms could achieve productivity gains through division of labor alone.

8

A crucial feature of Sokoloff’s analysis is an adjustment he made for a specific measurement issue – the alleged under-reporting of the labor input of entrepreneurs. This issue is important because the entrepreneur’s labor input was a larger fraction of the total labor input in small establishments than in large establishments. If the census systematically under-reported it, then measured labor productivity in small establishments would be biased upwards relative to large establishments, potentially complicating the estimation of economies of scale.

In Chapter Three, Robert Margo examines the implications of this particular measurement issue in depth as well as Sokoloff’s specific solution to the problem. Using samples of establishments from the 1850 to 1880 censuses of manufacturing, Margo first demonstrates that parametric estimates of economies of scale are not robust to the issue raised by

Sokoloff nor to his proposed solution. That is, if Sokoloff’s solution is implemented, then there is general evidence of economies of scale, but otherwise there is no such evidence.

Next, Margo assesses the textual and quantitative evidence pertaining to Sokoloff’s claim that the censuses undercounted the entrepreneurial input. Contrary to Sokoloff, Margo concludes that the census recognized the issue and that, by and large, the input was included in the labor count when appropriate. That said, Margo also shows, using previously unanalyzed data from the 1880 census, that the labor input was in fact biased downwards in small establishments relative to large ones but for a reason that is entirely different from the one asserted by Sokoloff.

Specifically, a problem arises because the labor input in the nineteenth-century manufacturing censuses generally refers to the typical number of workers present, not a true average. However, throughout the year establishments would add or shed workers, to meet their production needs.

For larger establishments, the distribution of workers employed around the typical number appears to have been more or less symmetric, whereas for small establishments, it is right-

9 skewed. Correcting for this problem does lower the measured labor productivity in smaller establishments relative to larger ones, but the correction is much smaller in magnitude than what

Sokoloff thought necessary.

One reading of Margo’s findings is that the smallest manufacturing establishments were more productive than previously thought and worthy of more careful study by economic historians. Alternatively, the consensus view might still be correct, but the nineteenth-century manufacturing censuses – a staple data source in American economic history – are not well suited to the parametric estimation of economies of scale. In that case, other types of data are needed to assess the productivity implications of the shift to large-scale production (Atack,

Margo, and Rhode 2014), a complaint levied at twentieth-century enterprise data as well

(Griliches and Ringstad 1971).

Farms were the most common form of American enterprise in the nineteenth century, and some, particularly southern cotton plantations, were among the largest and most sophisticated businesses of the time. Although obviously different in many ways from the manufacturing establishments studied by Margo in Chapter Three, some of the same themes about economies of scale achieved through specialization of tasks are common to the literatures on manufacturing and plantation farming. The notion that in certain key respects antebellum cotton plantations were similar to “factories in the field” has persisted in economic history for decades (see, for example, Stampp 1956).

As a starting point for Chapter Four, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode take the “factories in the fields” analogy at face value and then dig deeper into a wide range of historical sources to see whether the supposed similarities hold up under closer scrutiny. Collections of data from

10 nineteenth-century census manuscripts—the Parker-Gallman sample of southern farms, the

Bateman-Foust sample of northern farms, and the Atack-Bateman samples of manufacturing establishments—form the basis for their quantitative comparisons of the inputs and outputs of farms and factories. They also draw from a variety of primary and secondary sources, including a fresh reading of surviving plantation records, to characterize the operation of antebellum cotton plantations, to compare and contrast their management and operation with that of contemporary factories, and to challenge some influential descriptions of cotton production under slavery.

Olmstead and Rhode’s conclusions are mixed. In some respects, such as their use of professional managers, relatively large labor forces, and share of output, plantations were similar to factories, or at least more similar to factories than to family farms in the North. But in many other respects, including methods of production or the comparison of slaves to machinery, plantations were fundamentally different from factories. The analogy between plantations and factories, it would appear, served the rhetorical purposes of the historians who introduced it, and subsequently those of economic historians studying the relative efficiency of slave agriculture

(Fogel and Engerman 1974). However, Olmstead and Rhode argue that the analogy obscures more than it reveals and is, in any case, misleading as an organizing principle in studying the economics of American slavery. Within agriculture, and certainly between agriculture and manufacturing, enterprises varied greatly in their design and operation so as to maximize profit while producing fundamentally different goods under widely different environmental and institutional conditions (for example, with and without slaves). The variety and flexibility of enterprises defy easy analogies made across sectors, such as “factories in the fields.”

A relatively advanced financial system was an important causal factor in the economic growth of the United States in the nineteenth century (Rousseau and Sylla 2005). The role of

11 banks in facilitating American development has long been appreciated and studied, but the evolution of governance has received far less attention, despite its obvious importance during financial crises. In Chapter Five, Howard Bodenhorn and Eugene White present a first look at a large, new body of archival evidence on the evolution of bank governance. The evidence pertains to the state of New York, which required banks to file detailed “articles of association” describing their governance features, such as the time and place of shareholder meetings, shareholder voting rights, and many others. Some of these features are also found in the “certificates of condition” analyzed by Hilt. Bodenhorn and White’s analysis uses a sample of the surviving articles beginning in 1838 in conjunction with two other sources of information: the annual reports of New York’s Bank Superintendent and city directories for New York City,

Albany, Buffalo, and Rochester, which provide lists of banks and their directors.

Bodernhorn and White begin their analysis with an overview of the key legislative changes in New York banking history. This provides a broad dating of regime shifts in banking regulation: the eras of chartered banking (1789-1837), free banking (1838-1863), the National

Banking System (1864-1913), the early Federal Reserve (1914-1933), New Deal banking (1934-

1970s), and the current period (1970s to the present). Bodenhorn and White use this taxonomy as a frame of reference for their analysis of two features of bank governance: separation of ownership from control and the size of the board. They report two key preliminary findings.

First, during both the free banking and national banking eras, bank directors tended to hold a large fraction of bank shares, considerably more than was required by law. In effect, the bank managers must have had a significant fraction of their personal portfolios at stake, which, in

Bodenhorn and White’s view, properly incentivized their behavior. Ownership and control, in

12 other words, were effectively the same in New York’s banks throughout the long nineteenth century.

Second, Bodenhorn and White observed a decline over time in the size of bank boards.

While some of this decline can be attributed to the “aging” process within each bank – the longer the bank is in business, the smaller is its board – a significant portion appears to have been a long-term trend in the banking sector. Bodenhorn and White suggest that some of this decline may reflect changes in the composition of the boards and the degree of specialization of their members, but they also speculate that regime shifts in played a role. It remains for future research to parse out the relative contributions of changes in banking practice versus regulation, as well as the implications for economic performance of the decrease in board size.

The United States experienced a “transportation revolution” in the nineteenth century that entailed the development of an efficient and geographically dispersed network of inland waterways and railroads. This network profoundly shaped the pace and pattern of economic activity and complemented the ongoing “industrial revolution.” Although there is a long tradition in economic history of studying the aggregate resource-saving effects of transport innovations, it is only recently that economic historians have been able to study the impact of the transportation revolution at a more disaggregated level. This has been made possible by the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software that permits the construction of statistical databases from digitized historical maps. These databases retain information from the maps, such as whether a particular area had access to a railroad, which can be linked at the county level to other databases with information on economic characteristics and outcomes. In the United States case, Jeremy Atack (2013) has been a pioneer in the application of GIS methods in constructing county-level databases documenting the spread of the transportation

13 infrastructure in the nineteenth century. Atack’s databases have been used to study the county- level impact of gaining rail access on population density and the rate of urbanization (Atack,

Bateman, Haines, and Margo 2010); the proportion of establishments meeting a definition of

“factory” status (Atack, Haines, and Margo 2011); per acre land values in agriculture, agricultural improvements, the rate of landownership (Atack and Margo 2011, 2012); and other aspects of the transportation revolution (Donaldson and Hornbeck 2013).

In Chapter Six, Atack, Matthew Jaremski, and Peter Rousseau examine whether improved transportation, specifically railroad access, improved bank stability and performance before the Civil War. They note that banks that lacked effective monitoring and internal governance did not always align incentives properly, leading to unsound practices known as

“wildcat banking” in the colorful language of the period. Atack, Jaremski, and Rousseau argue, however, that there are good reasons to believe that bank behavior improved when a local area became interconnected with the rest of the economy through the arrival of a rail line.

To test this hypothesis the authors link the most recent version of Atack’s transportation database to comprehensive bank-level data for the period 1830 to 1862. Because the location of the bank is known, it is possible to determine its physical proximity to a railroad at points in time over this interval. Measures of bank behavior are constructed from bank balance sheets. Atack,

Jaremski, and Rousseau conduct two primary empirical analyses. First, they use hazard models to assess the relationship between rail access and bank failure rates. They find that gaining rail access is associated with a reduced risk of bank failure. In other words, improved transportation appears to have made the banking system more stable. Importantly, the positive effect on stability is confined to the railroads; a similar impact is not apparent for water transportation.

Second, further empirical analysis reveals that rail access had its effect in part because it seems

14 to have led to larger banks (and possibly, therefore, to economies of scale) that were less prone to failure and also to changes in lending practices that made the bank less susceptible to risk.

However, the effect of rail access on bank persistence remains positive and statistically significant even when the authors include controls for urbanization and bank balance sheet variables, or when they take account of the endogenous nature of gaining rail access. An important implication of the chapter is that the impact on bank stability is an example of a positive externality of the rail network that is not taken into account in traditional measures of the social savings of the railroad (Fogel 1964; Fishow 1965).

Banks were one component of the wide variety of economic organizations and institutions that made up the American “.” Economic historians have studied various features of this market, in particular, its efficiency at allocating resources as measured by differentials. A key issue in American economic development is the allocation of capital across regions. It has been established that, over the course of the nineteenth century, interest rate differentials narrowed across regions as improvements in transportation and communications, such as the telegraph, increased the information available to financial intermediaries and enabled arbitrage to take place. But another important margin concerns differences in rates of return across sectors of the economy, which remained large well into the twentieth century.

In Chapter Seven, Mary Hansen takes a fresh look at these sector differences from the lens of an almost completely novel data source – federal bankruptcy records. These records provide exceptional detail on borrowers and creditors and their arrangements. On a priori grounds, one might think that bankruptcy records would not very especially useful as a source of information on credit markets because of obvious selection issues. That is, those who file for

15 bankruptcy are not a random sample of borrowers; and the creditors of these borrowers may differ systematically from the relevant population as well. In Hansen’s case, this might seem doubly problematic because the records she examines pertain to the Great Depressions, an obviously atypical period in American history. Paradoxically, however, this works in her favor because it is reasonable to believe that during the 1930s bankruptcies were more likely to mirror the population of borrowers and creditors at large.

Due to the unusual nature and ongoing expansion of Hansen’s dataset, her analysis should be regarded as exploratory and suggestive. The larger project, of which this chapter is a part, will cover a broad geographic area, whereas the data analyzed in Chapter Seven come from one state, Mississippi. Hansen focuses her attention primarily on the physical distance between borrowers and creditors. Although the majority of transactions in the data occurred between proximate borrowers and lenders, a surprising number occurred across state lines, sometimes at great distances. However, this does not apply to manufacturers, who rarely obtained credit from distant lenders. Rather, much long-distance lending seems to have involved trade credit between businesses facilitating the purchase, for example, of inventory, or business-consumer credit facilitating the purchase of household goods or farm implements. It remains to be seen whether similar findings will emerge when Hansen extends her sample of bankruptcies to other states and time periods.

Collectively, the book’s chapters provide multifaceted and inter-connected accounts of how businesses, banks, and credit markets promoted the transformation of the American economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several major themes in U.S. economic history come into view: laws that influenced the organization of business enterprises, the rise of incorporation and its connection to factory production in manufacturing, the existence (or not) of

16 economies of scale within nineteenth-century manufacturing, the organization and operation of large cotton plantations in comparison with factories, the regulation and governance of banks, the transportation revolution’s influence on the bank stability and survival, and the emergence of long-distance credit in the context of an economy that was growing rapidly and becoming increasingly integrated across space. Throughout, there is emphasis on how economic enterprises were organized and how they operated. In this sense the chapters illuminate a layer of economic history that rests beneath more the abstract aggregates of macro-level growth accounting.

17

References

Atack, Jeremy. 2013. “On the Use of Geographic Information Systems in Economic History: The

American Transportation Revolution Revisited,” Journal of Economic History 73: 313-

338.

Atack, Jeremy; and Fred Bateman. 2006. “Manufacturing,” in S.B. Carter, S.S. Gartner, M.R.

Haines, A.L. Olmstead, R. Sutch, and G. Wright, eds. Historical Statistics of the United

States, volume 4, pp. 573-578. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Atack, Jeremy; Fred Bateman; Michael Haines; and Robert A. Margo. 2010. “Did Railroads

Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the

American Midwest, 1850-1860,” Social Science History 34: 171-197.

Atack, Jeremy; Michael Haines; and Robert A. Margo. 2011. “Railroads and the Rise of the

Factory: Evidence for the United States, 1850-1870,” in P. Rhode, J. Rosenbloom, D.

Weiman, eds. Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time, pp. 162-179. Palo

Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Atack, Jeremy; and Robert A. Margo. 2011. “The Impact of Access to Rail Transportation on

Agricultural Improvement: The American Midwest as a Test Case,” The Journal of

Transport and Land Use 4: 5-18.

Atack, Jeremy; and Robert A. Margo. 2012. “Landownership and the Coming of the Railroad to

the American Midwest, 1850-1860,” in A. McCants, Eduardo Biera, Jose M. Lopes

Cordeiro, and Paulo Lourenco, eds. Railroads in Historical Context: Construction, Costs,

and Consequences, Volume 1, pp. 151-178. Inovatec: V.N. Gaia, Portugal.

Atack, Jeremy; Robert A. Margo; and Paul Rhode. 2014. “The Division of Labor and

18

Economies of Scale in Late Nineteenth Century American Manufacturing: New

Evidence,” unpublished paper, Department of Economics, Boston University, May.

Berle, Adolf and Gardiner Means. 1932. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New

York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Carter, Susan B. 2006. “Labor Force” in S.B. Carter, S.S. Gartner, M.R. Haines, A.L. Olmstead,

R. Sutch, and G. Wright, eds. Historical Statistics of the United States, volume 2, pp. 13-

35. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Donaldson, Dave and Richard Hornbeck. 2013. “Railroads and American Economic Growth: A

‘Market Access’ Approach.” NBER Working Paper 19213.

Fogel, Robert. 1964. Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric

History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. 1974. Time on the Cross: The Economics of

American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

Fishlow, Albert. 1965. American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Griliches, Zvi and Vidar Ringstad 1971. Economies of Scale and the Form of the Production

Function. Amsterdam: North Holland.

19

Kindleberger, Charles P. 1996. World Economic Primacy, 1500-1990. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some

So Poor. New York: W.W. Norton Company.

Maddison, Angus. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Organisation for

Economic Co-Operation and Development.

Margo, Robert A. This volume. “Economies of Scale in Nineteenth Century American

Manufacturing Revisited: A Solution to the Entrepreneurial Labor Input Problem.”

Rousseau, Peter; and Richard Sylla. 2005. “Emerging Financial Markets and Early US Growth,”

Explorations in Economic History 42: 1-26.

Sokoloff, Kenneth. 1984. “Was the Transition from the Artisan Shop to the Mechanized Factory

Associated with Gains in Efficiency? Evidence from the U.S. Manufacturing Censuses of

1820 and 1850,” Explorations in Economic History 21: 351-382.

Stampp, Kenneth. 1956. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York:

Vantage Books.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau. 2011. “Mean Center of Population for the

United States, 1790-2010.” Accessed April 5, 2014.

https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/pdfs/cenpop2010/centerpop_mean2010.pdf.

20