Volume 22 of Research in Economic History contains six papers.
Three are on agriculture and two on macro issues related to the
Great Depression. A concluding paper examines trends in interstate
migration in the United States.
Fred Pryor begins the volume with a provocative exploration of the
degree to which the Neolithic revolution was in fact revolutionary.
Pryor argues for a considerably lesser break with the past than has
been commonly asserted. He maintains, in particular, that
hunter-gatherer methods of procuring subsistence persisted
alongside a continuum of agricultural practices. His evidence is
drawn largely from records of surviving hunter-gatherer
societies.
Moving forward 10 millennia, Gregory Clark provides details of his
construction of an annual price series for English net agricultural
output from 1209 to 1914. Clark incorporates fresh archival
material with existing published series, using consistent methods
to build and aggregate 26 component series.
In the third paper on farming, Giovanni Federico estimates world
agricultural production from 1800 to 1938. He concludes that output
grew more rapidly than population, and did so on all continents,
although more rapidly in countries of Western settlement and in
Eastern Europe than in Asia or in Western Europe. Federico also
finds that output grew faster before World War One than in the
inter-war years, and resulted over time in an increase in the share
of livestock products.
Continuing into the twentieth century, we have two papers on the
Great Depression. First, Barry Eichengreen and Kris Mitchener
explore the degree to which the seeds of economic downturn were
sown during the 1920s, particularly through "excessive" credit
creation. The authors develop quantitative measures of credit
expansion and ask how well these indicators account for "uneveness"
in the twenties expansion as well as the depth and severity of the
depression in individual countries. They complement this macro
analysis with sectoral studies of real estate, consumer durables,
and high-tech sectors.
Jakob Madsen's contribution is also based on an examination of
depression macro history in a number of countries, but his focus is
on output and labor rather than credit markets. he explores the
perennial questions of how sticky were wages and prices and whether
such stickiness played a significant casual role in the rise of
unemployment. Contrary to many models that assume or assert that
prices are inherently more flexible than nominal wages, Madsen
finds the reverse: prices adjusted slowly to changes in nominal
wages, and this stickiness played a role in propagating economic
depression.
Finally, Josh Rosenbloom and Bill Sundstrom explore changing rates
of interstate migration by examining individual-level data from
population censuses available in the Integrated Public Use
Microdata Series (IPUMS). Their central finding is that
propensities to migrate within the United States have traced out a
U-shaped pattern, tending to fall between 1850 and 1900 and then,
during the twentieth century, rising until around 1970.
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