The Bank of England depleted its open-market portfolio by secretly sterilizing large gold inflows. Thereafter interest rates were influenced by manipulating reported gold flows. Expectations manipulation as a monetary policy channel is modeled and estimated. A gold flow falsification was over two-thirds as effective as an open-market operation. These results contradict accepted new classical models and suggest that credibility benefits from new classical policy are small, despite current popularity among central bankers. The episode supports Peter Temin’s view of interwar central bankers as nonstabilizers and enforcers of a dysfunctional classical orthodoxy.

Societies usually do not define explicitly the criteria of the legitimacy of the penetration of the price-system into different areas, and I suppose that, as social scientists, we should be grateful for this omission, since this is the kind of thing that forms the basis of our livelihood.

Professor Goodrich had indicated that my function is to discuss the relevance of the concept of economic growth to the tasks of the economic historian. But I hope I may be forgiven if I touch incidentally on other sensitive and overworked areas—notably the relationship between theory and quantity on the one hand and history on the other. If the study of economic growth still meant what it did in Adam Smith's day there might be no need to be so cavalier—there might even be no need to hold this session. But a good number of intellectual bridges have fallen into the water since 1776 and it is surely necessary to examine this new construction with an eye not only to its permanence but to its utility.

It is impossible to summarize and critique this book adequately in a short review. Its author is a leading historian of economic thought, skilled in many disciplines, imaginative and penetrating in analysis, and possessed of knowledge, brilliance, and pixie-like cynicism. His More Heat than Light (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) traced the origins of twentieth-century economics to a mimicking of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics in order to achieve the status of “science.” This book traces the social construction of high theory in economics during World War II and the Cold War to the influence of John von Neumann's general theory of automata and the military funding of basic economic science. Like his earlier book, this is history of economics on a massively ambitious scale—a theory of the entire postwar period.

Constantine J. Spiliotes makes a substantial new contribution to the literature on presidential decision making. Spiliotes seeks to bring together two largely separate literatures: presidential studies and rational choice theory. This is a formidable task: Economists and rational-choice political scientists typically view traditional presidential studies as excessively anecdotal for the purpose of establishing generally applicable theories, and presidential-studies scholars typically view rational-choice models as excessively abstract and parsimonious for the purpose of understanding the complexities of the presidency.

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curve and the NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment), and so ingrained was this orthodoxy that most policymakers accepted it. Is the NAIRU dead?

The Russell Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation believed that the 1990s required a closer examination to see what we could learn from this seemingly unusual period. They asked Robert Solow and Alan Krueger to assemble the set of topics and authors that resulted in this volume. The book is divided into four parts.

Economic historians have always recognized the importance of changes in population to any investigation of economic growth or well-being. The payments to labor in every economy, even the highly industrialized modern economies, always constitute the bulk of national income when figured via the factor payments method. Hence what happens to the size and rate of compensation of the labor force is crucial to any economic history. With this in mind we present below new decade population and labor force estimates as a first step toward understanding the overall growth of seventeenth-century New England.

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were more than twice as responsive as whites to income transfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independent living arrangements. My findings have implications for understanding racial differences in rates of retirement and independent living at the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise in retirement prior to 1930, and the subsequent convergence in black-white retirement rates and living arrangements.

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource price leads the owner to prefer communal harvesting, which simplifies monitoring against theft. I support this framework with evidence from colonial court records. “Palm cutting always cause palaver.”

As Tirthankar Roy explains in his preface, this book “aims to be no more than an updated and shorter version of the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II” (henceforth CEHI), one that will provide an accessible textbook on the economic history of colonial India for the compulsory course in the subject in most Indian universities. In this task he has been successful. Instead of ploughing through the detailed chapters of the otherwise indispensable CEHI, students—and their teachers—now have a useful educational aid which summarizes the latest research by economic historians of India.

The existing literature on the economy of medieval England views the practice of convertible husbandry as a more efficient alternative to regular common fields. The article challenges this view by measuring the productivities of the systems, which are found to be approximately equivalent. In interpreting this finding, it is suggested that edaphic conditions and wrongful managerial practices account for the poor performance of convertible husbandry during the Middle Ages, whereas the greater productivity achieved by the system in the early modern period is attributed to the introduction of fodder legumes, such as clover, which were absent in previous centuries.

Italian sources have so far furnished the principal materials for the study of medieval business history in the Mediterranean area. Florence, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, it seems fair to say, were the cradles of important commercial institutions. For their merchant guilds, sea loan contracts, and various forms of business organization, other Mediterranean towns were largely in debt to the Italian cities. In Catalonia, a region that experienced a remarkable expansion of overseas trade during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the borrowing and adaptation of Italian institutions were continuous. But in Barcelona, the presumptive birthplace of the Llibre del consolat de mar, the early development of deposit banking and marine insurance law was a product of Catalan initiative. It is highly possible that the rich historical archives of Barcelona will also yield important data for the study of early life-insurance and annuity practices.

This paper re-examines the changing structure of Canadian agriculture over the period between Confederation and the beginning of the “wheat boom.” A pattern of changes is found that differs in some respects from the long-received accounts. The shift from wheat to mixed farming was accomplished by an earlier date than is usually supposed, and domestic demand is due more emphasis, relative to export demand, than it is usually given.

In this paper we stratify a sample of 24 countries by the role of agriculture in industrial growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focus on systematic differences in the nature and strength of the interactions of institutional with agricultural and industrial change. A novel technique, disjoint principal components models, is applied to categorized data representing 35 facets of social, economic, and political structure and institutions. The results stress the systematic variations in the impact of land institutions among countries with different levels and structures of development. They also underline the critical role of social and political forces in differentiating among paths of economic change. Finally, they highlight the need for cross-section studies using institutional data to understand better the complexity of institutional constraints and influences which often vary little in a given national environment.