Will technical change spur conflicts in the labor market? In this study, we examine electricity adoption in Sweden during the first decades of the twentieth century. Exploiting that proximity to hydropowered plants shaped the electricity network independently of previous local conditions, we estimate the impact of electricity on labor strikes. Our results indicate that electricity adoption preceded an increase in conflicts, but strikes were of an offensive nature and most common in sectors with increasing labor demand. This suggests that electrification provided workers with a stronger bargaining position from which they could voice their claims.

This article contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labor market to interwar data. The results indicate that demand shocks, combined with nominal inertia in the labor market, were important in explaining unemployment. Real wage pressures due to procedures for wage determination were a major influence on unemployment, but were partly offset by movements in other supply-side variables, such as the replacement ratio and the pricing policy of cartels. Demand- and supply-side variables were mutually reinforcing in the Great Depression and in the recovery under the Nazis.

Little more than a century ago India rubber was a curiosity. Today, it is vital to our existence. The purpose here is to examine the basic factors that have influenced the growth of the rubber industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. The method chosen is to review the industry's position before and after the introduction of the automobile, say at 1900 and 1950. Much of what is to be said might be compressed into current economic terminology. Neither disrespect for this procedure nor the inapplicability of many of its concepts to economic history has prevented this course from being adopted.

The seasonality of weddings molded itself to regionally specific patterns of labor in early-modern England. Advantage can thus be taken of the widely available if unlikely source of parish registers of marriages to reveal the timing of regional specialization, defined narrowly as the ability of regions to forgo the production of the staples of local consumption and concentrate on whatever production best suited local resources of land and labor.

This paper uses independent real wages, earnings, labor force data, and an examination of Kuznet's 1953 data to explore the recent contention that real per capita incomes for most of the American population declined from 1923 through 1929. It concludes that there is little evidence to support this contention.

This multiple regression study of women's and men's wages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania manufacturing finds that the average pay gap has changed in favor of women from 1900–1950 in several industries and in the aggregate. Technological homogenization of jobs is suggested as a possible explanation of gender-based wage convergence. An overall framework of forces and relations of production is outlined, and future work on this newly introduced body of data is suggested.

This paper will test three models of underdevelopment against the experience of Thailand from 1850 to 1940, when Thailand became a major rice exporter. The models are a dependency model, a staples model, and a supply and demand model of technical and institutional change. The technical and institutional change model provides the best explanation. Divergences between the goals of national security and economic development as well as those between the private interests of the elite decision makers and the social interest explain Thai underinvestment in increasing agricultural productivity and account in large part for the persistence of underdevelopment.

Thomas Jefferson believed that political democracy could be maintained in the United States only if it were made to rest on the firm foundation of economic democracy. “The small landowners are the most precious part of the State,” he said, contrasting this ideal economy with a congested population in urban centers which would, he feared, threaten democracy because it would be subject to control by agitators and demagogues. He urged the adoption of a policy of cheap land that would attract laborers from abroad and from the eastern cities to the newly developing areas of the West and the South. Thus he proposed to create a nation of farm owners who would be the very warp and woof of democracy.

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the Early Modern period has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” Using a new time series of nobility cases I provide the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that the tax exemptions cannot alone explain the flight to privilege. My data show that the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments. Although ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence linking it to economic stagnation in Spain.

This article uses data from Major League Baseball's integration to identify the sources and magnitude of labor market discrimination. Returns to hiring black workers in this industry were high, and the industry's labor supply was uniquely suited for rapid integration, yet integration evolved slowly. Many explanations for this sluggishness are considered, including both taste-based and statistical discrimination. Ultimately, only owner and collective coworker discrimination can explain baseball's slow pace of integration. The estimated levels of discrimination are high, showing the median team sacrificed profits of nearly $2.2 million in 1950 dollars (over $19 million 2010 dollars) by delaying integration.

This article shows that there were timing, geographic, and sectoral anomalies in the 1937/38 recession, none of which are easily explained by aggregate shocks. I argue that an auto industry supply shock contributed both to the recession's anomalies and to its severity. Labor-strife-induced wage increases and an increase in raw material costs led auto manufacturers to raise prices in fall 1937. Expectations of these price increases brought auto sales forward. When auto prices finally rose, sales plummeted. This shock likely reduced 1938 auto sales by roughly 600,000 units and 1938 GDP growth by 0.5–1 percentage point.

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

New estimates of the growth in total and per capita consumption are developed for the Soviet Union during the first three Five-Year Plans. These estimates show that consumption per head rose 27 percent from 1928 to 1937. The gains were confined to the urban population and to those moving from the countly to the city. In the standard interpretation, per capita consumption fell in the 1930s. The reasons for the difference in interpretation are examined in detail. The estimates presented here are based on new information and on alternative approaches to valuation and index number problems.

In a review of a recent play by T. S. Eliot, the critic sums up the action as “a tragedy of non-communication between parent and child.” We may be sure the reviewer did not intend to raise a doubt in the reader's mind as to whether the father or son in question had difficulty in getting to a telephone, finding a telegraph office or deciphering one another's handwriting. The level of communication he must have had in mind lies deep in the human dependency on expressive symbols. These primary factors of human experience—primary in the sense that nothing stands between them and the raw sensations and impulses—are made up of words, gestures, and images which are, in turn, invariably organized in systems or complexes. These we call by such names as aims, standards and ideals or, more generally, attitudes.

There is impressive evidence that wealthy peasants contributed significantly to the success of the Meiji Restoration, the political revolution that launched Japan on her career of modernization. These rural capitalists, for such they were, helped to give the revolution direction as well as power. How otherwise is one to account for a government dominated by samurai, the elite carriers of tradition, following policies that did great violence to Japan's past and destroyed the privileged status of the warrior class? But if the influence of the representatives of rural wealth was so strong, why did they consent to a clique of warriors holding political power almost as a private prerogative for a generation after the Restoration? Despite the demand for a share in power in the eighties, they did consent and weakly accepted the Meiji constitution which sanctified authoritarian government.

Flaring westward from the upper valley of the Wabash lies the prairie triangle, embracing most of central and northern Illinois and almost all of Iowa. Much of this region today lies in the heart of the corn belt. Its economic history is a story of practical experimentation, adaptation, and change as its restless settlers endeavored after 1820 to unlock its wealth. To do so, the prairie pioneers had to adapt techniques and crops to the novel environment of an almost treeless grassland at a time when both technology and markets were undergoing revolutionary change. In 1830 the farm-makers had hardly begun their task; by the 1890's the land was tamed, the corn belt a fact, its farmers on the threshold of a golden age.

Today's best-known price indexes for Wholesale Price and Consumer Price Indexesthe Unitedof theStates are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Indexes of Prices Received and Paid by Farmers, issued by the Department of Agriculture. These indexes, however, are comparatively new. The “Wholesale Price Index” dates from 1902 with indexes covering the years 1890-1901. The “Consumer Price Index” is of even more recent origin. Retail food price indexes were established on a regular basis in 1901, again with data back to 1890. Other goods and services were not added until after World War I, with estimates back to 1913 based on special studies in shipbuilding cities. The “Index of Prices Received by Farmers” was issued by the Department of Agriculture in 1924 and “Prices Paid by Farmers” in 1928. Botfi of these series were extended back to 1910.