Data

Primary-source economic data, transcribed from the original printed tables into machine-readable form and released openly. Both datasets underlie papers of mine, but they are published separately because the transcription is useful independently of the argument it was built for.

Datasets

The Continental dollar, 1777–1781 Scales of depreciation enacted by seven states to settle debts in Continental currency, with contemporary merchants' quotations for Philadelphia and Virginia. The greenbacks, 1859–1866 Gold prices, commodity prices, wages and the money stock during the American Civil War, from Wesley C. Mitchell's History of the Greenbacks.

Method

Everything here is transcribed from page images rather than OCR. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tables this matters more than it sounds: optical character recognition corrupts the fractions that pervade the originals and confuses digits in ways that change values materially. In one case the difference between an OCR reading and the page was 800 against 300.

Where a second source reproduces the same series, the two are cross-checked and the agreement rate is reported. Where sources conflict, both are published rather than one being silently preferred — and where the enacted statute survives, it is used in preference to any later compilation.

Every CSV carries a comment header giving the source, table and page numbers, so any figure can be traced back to the printed original without consulting the README. Transcriptions are released under CC0; please cite the underlying sources as well, which are listed in each repository.

If you find an error in a transcription, please open an issue. I would rather be corrected than cited wrongly.