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Relying on a new dataset, this paper examines the genesis of current account fluctuations and the investment cycle in Italy. We perform a Granger causality test that shows that the persistent current account deficits in the years from unification to World War I were generated by variations in capital inflows, as hypothesized by Fenoaltea, and not by the dynamics of GDP, as in the Bonelli–Cafagna model. Finally, we show that these capital inflows prompted an industrial investment cycle in equipment and machinery but not – as claimed by Fenoaltea (1988) – a general investment cycle which included also construction and more volatile components of investment. These patterns held under both fixed and floating exchange rate regimes.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

Volume 26 of Research in Economic History includes six papers, evenly divided between European and North American topics. Beginning with the European topics, we have two data intensive papers and a survey/synthesis. Stefano Fenoaltea and Carlo Ciccarelli provide new estimates of social overhead investment in the different regions of Italy. This is followed by Markus Lampe's paper reporting data on bilateral trade flows in Europe between 1857 and 1875. The third contribution on a European topic is Bernard Harris's survey of the literature on gender, health, and welfare in England and Wales since industrialization.

This paper presents the first annual estimates for the rail-guided vehicles industry in post-Unification Italy. Nationally, maintenance was naturally trend-dominated, while new construction followed a Kuznets cycle; overall, maintenance exceeded new construction, while freight cars represented the largest component of the latter. The limited production of locomotives over the initial decades seems tied to high raw material costs rather than to technical inadequacy. Regionally, new construction was concentrated in the industrial triangle, and in Campania; maintenance was more widely diffused, as repair work tended to follow local traffic, but it too was largely absent from the swath of mostly Southern regions without major urban centers.

Why did peasants in old-regime Europe scatter their land in small strips within open fields? According to an influential theory advocated by Deirdre McCloskey, the system’s main aim was risk reduction. By spreading out land, peasants were less exposed to the caprices of nature: heavy rains, droughts, frost, or hailstorms. In a time when other insurance institutions were lacking, this approach could be a rational solution, even if, as McCloskey suggests, it could be achieved only at the expense of overall agricultural productivity.

Over the years, McCloskey’s theory has repeatedly been debated. Still, it has never been empirically established to what extent the open fields actually reduced risk. McCloskey offered only indirect evidence, based on hypothetical calculations from short series demesne level yields. Risks on enclosed and open-field land farms were thus never compared.

This chapter presents farm-level harvest variation series, including observations from both types of land. It is based on tithe records of 1,700 farms in Southern Sweden from 1715–1860. Results show that scattering had a limited effect on agricultural risk. The system did protect against small-scale local crop failures. It was less efficient, however, when it came to the large-scale regional harvest disasters that constituted a much more serious threat to peasants of the time. From this perspective, the inner logic of the open-field system is taken up for renewed consideration.

This article presents estimates of social-overhead construction in Italy's regions. The new-construction series point to a largely common cycle in non-railway work, and largely idiosyncratic bursts of railway building. Maintenance doubles as an index of the underlying stock, which cannot be calculated from the flows alone; one finds limited convergence, and only in railway infrastructure. Industrial and overall growth are increasingly correlated both with the initial stock, and with its increment. Direct measures of welfare improvements are uncertain, but the relative increases in draftees’ mean heights correlate in particular with social-overhead investment.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.