This is a colossal volume—it is at once a compendium, a survey, a critical evaluation, and a clear exposition of a burgeoning field. It is a study of macroeconomic policy-making in the presence of heterogeneity across actors. Allan Drazen argues that the sine qua non of politics is the conflict of interests; and the core of political economy is that policies are the outcome of the interaction of competing individuals and groups whose concern is their own welfare and not necessarily that of any other individuals or the society as a whole.

To better understand the historical gender wage gap, we investigate the wages of Swedish compositors circa 1900 using a rich data set of matched employer-employee information with national coverage. In line with previous findings, women earned about 70 percent of men’s wages on average. Individual and job characteristics explain much of this shortfall. Firm characteristics or firm fixed effects, on average, explain 17 percent of the gap, though the firm mattered more for the gender gap in big cities than elsewhere. Sorting across firms is thus an important part of understanding historical gender wage gaps. While most studies conclude that a significant portion of the gender gap is unexplained, suggesting labor market discrimination, this may result from a lack of information on the distribution of men and women across firms.

This paper examines how the worship of ancient wisdom affects economic progress in historical China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Using the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited industrialization between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism. This finding implies the importance of cultural entrepreneurship, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth.

The 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the “G.I. Bill”) provided returning WWII veterans with educational benefits sufficient to cover tuition, fees, and living expenses at almost any U.S. university or college. While several studies examine subsequent educational attainment and earnings for male veterans, little is known about how the G.I. Bill affected the 330,000 American females who served in WWII. Using data from the 1980 5 percent Census Public-use Microdata Sample, I find that female WWII veteran status is associated with a 19 percentage point increase in the proportion who report any college attendance, a 7.8 percentage point increase in college completion, and earnings that are 19.8 percent greater relative to comparable females who are not veterans. Because service was entirely voluntary for females, I use service eligibility requirements, enlistment records, 1940 Census data, and the G.I. Bill’s retroactive nature to establish a causal relationship among veteran status, educational attainment via the G.I. Bill, and increased earnings. To help separate the effect of the G.I. Bill from the effect of military service itself, and because benefits increased with longer service, I instrument for female veterans’ educational attainment using age at the time of the G.I. Bill’s announcement. My instrumental variables estimates imply that female veterans’ earnings increase by $1,350 (11.6 percent) per year of G.I. Bill-induced education, explaining 73 percent of the overall difference between veteran and non-veteran females’ earnings in 1980.

Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 percent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives.

In this article, I investigate the effect of landholding inequalities on the democratization process in nineteenth-century France. I focus on the 1849 election, which followed the establishment of the Second Republic (1848–1851), and on the first six elections of the Third Republic (1870–1940), which took place between 1876 and 1893. I find that stronger landholding inequalities were associated to a lower support for the Republicans, and therefore constituted a threat to the consolidation of democracy. I provide evidence that large landowners resisted the establishment of democracy by influencing the electoral behavior of economically dependent agricultural workers.

In the last decades of the Tsarist regime the eight provinces where, according to the census of 1897, Ukrainians predominated—Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, Poltava, Chernigov, Kharkov, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav—were largely rural. Less than one seventh of the population in these provinces inhabited urban centers. The rural population, moreover, coincided closely with the Ukrainian nationality: more than nine of every ten Ukrainians lived in the country districts, and most of these were classified as peasants. Since two out of every three of the urban residents were Russians or Jews, the limited number of Ukrainians dwelling among them tended to become absorbed into industries which provided a natural milieu for “Russification.” In the cultural conflict, “Ukrainian” became synonymous with 9peasant”; and the nickname for the Ukrainian—khokhol—has the same derogatory connotation as the Russian term muzhik, which evokes a picture of a shaggily bearded, unwashed, unkempt, illiterate country bumpkin.

In a recent paper in this Journal, James Millar and Susan Linz seek “to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.” They argue that Soviet direct estimates of non-human war cost (capital loss plus direct war outlays plus wartime loss of national income), made by a postwar Extraordinary Commission, imply a cost per employed member of the 1940 population of 7.4 years' earnings. Their own indirect approximation of war cost—based on a construct which incorporates estimates of prewar and wartime propensities to consume and invest, a 30 percent capital loss claimed by the Soviets, and an assumed capital-output ratio of 3—is 3.9 years' earnings. After hypothesizing various values for their parameters, they conclude that “[t]he popular Soviet claim that World War II cost ‘two Five-Year Plans’ is, therefore, above the upper limit [6.0 years' earnings] of the range of the total war cost estimates calculated using Soviet national income data.”2 The implication is that their results cast significant doubt on “the reasonableness” of Soviet claims of war cost. This paper will demonstrate that if the Soviet direct estimate of war cost is properly expressed in Sovietmeasured 1940 consumption years, Millar-Linz's perceived divergence between the Soviet direct and their indirect estimate of war cost disappears.

The economic impact of American public land policies in the nineteenth century can be assessed either in terms of their efficiency or equity effects, that is, their impact on national growth rates or on income distribution. Robert W. Fogel and Jack Rutner recently explored the growth question and discovered that federal land policy had a positive but minimal effect on economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the equity question is perhaps more important than the efficiency issue, a point made several years earlier by Douglass C. North.