This article examines the historical record of the Austro-Hungarian monetary union, focusing on its bargaining dimension. As a result of the 1867 Compromise, Austria and Hungary shared a common currency, although they were fiscally sovereign and independent entities. By using repeated threats to quit, Hungary succeeded in obtaining more than proportional control and forcing the common central bank into a policy that was very favourable to it. Using insights from public economics, this article explains the reasons for this outcome. Because Hungary would have been able to secure quite good conditions for itself had it broken apart, Austria had to provide its counterpart with incentives to stay on board. I conclude that the eventual split of Hungary after World War I was therefore not ‘written on the wall’ in 1914, since the Austro-Hungarian monetary union was quite profitable to Hungarians.

This article examines important aspects of the interaction between the fiscal history and political events of tsarist Russia's final years in the light of macroeconomic theories of government budget constraints. Using econometric tests of intertemporal stability and techniques of intervention analysis, I find that tsarist Russia had achieved a sustainable peacetime balance in its fiscal relations by the eve of World War I, but that this balance was lost under the strain of wartime financial difficulty.

Having been separated into numerous autonomous states, nineteenth-century Germany was the very model of a regionally diversified process of industrialisation. How the nutritional status of Germans developed during early industrialisation is analysed in this article. With newly available data, average height for birth cohorts 1770–1849 is established for the two German states of Saxony and Wuerttemberg. The development of these heights is compared to the – so far – sole German height trend of this epoch, the average height of Bavarians. The results suggest that, starting with the birth cohorts of the Napoleonic era, the biological standard of living was on the decline across all the three German territories under consideration. An explorative interpretation of the height trend in Saxony reveals that during the beginning of industrialisation a mixture of relatively bad climatic conditions, rising prices of foodstuffs and a persistently falling real income can be held responsible for the rapid and substantial decline of the nutritional status in this pioneering state of German industrialisation. Finally, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Saxons found themselves trapped in a classical type of nutritional crisis.

This article presents new evidence on the determinants of short-time working in Britain during the interwar period. Using a selection of manufacturing industries we test the impact that output volatility, the benefit-wage ratio, and trade union density had on short-time working. We find that persistence effects (captured by lagged values of output fluctuation) and gender differences in trade union density were important for a number of industries. However, perhaps our most interesting finding is that the benefit-wage ratio also exercised a statistically significant impact on short-time working. This suggests that the Benjamin-Kochin thesis may be important after all. In other words, the army of short-time workers that existed in Britain between the Wars may, indeed, have been a ‘volunteer army’.