The paper examines the thesis, popular among Russian Marxists, that Russian serfdom had become unprofitable for the serfowners before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Four theoretical models are constructed in order to determine the effects on serfdom of population growth, rise in grain prices, certain restrictions on the serfs' labor obligations, and the replacement of labor services with money payments. Prices of serfs for the several regions and provinces are estimated by regression.With the exception of Lithuania, neither the theoreticalnor the empirical results confirm the Marxist hypothesis.

Early in 1932 the Federal Reserve System made a serious attempt to reverse the “Great Contraction” throught expansionary open market operations, but abandoned it a few months later. In this paper we offer an interpretation of the episode that throws new light on the Fed's behavior during the Depression. Key are the attitude of private bankers, Britain's abandonment of the gold standard, and the brief open market campaign. To protect bank profits the Fed abandoned the program which set the stage for the complete financial collapse of the United States in early 1933.

During Amsterdam's development as the commercial center of Europe in the seventeenth century, an informal “information exchange” appeared among the economic and political institutions of the city. Informational economies of the types discussed by Stigler, North, and Pred led to the emergence of Amsterdam as the focal point of information flows throughout Europe. They also encouraged a high level of innovation within all functional areas of Amsterdam's information exchange—especially in long-term data analysis—which contributed to the general modernization of capitalism.

This paper documents a secular increase during the antebellum period in the fraction of New York's population that received public poor relief. The increase was concentrated among able-bodied adults who required only short-term assistance during periods of sickness or unemployment. Cross-sectional patterns suggest that the rise of market production and the spread of wage labor in both urban-industrial and rural-agricultural sectors, rather than urbanization or industrialization, may have been responsible for the upward trend in short-term, ablebodied pauperism.

The importance of tariff protection in the U.S. cotton textile industry is examined quantitatively for the period around 1833. In sharp contradiction to past writings it is found that the industry was almost entirely dependent on protection.

A literature has developed recently to analyze the disruptive effects on small, open economies of a sudden change in the value of their natural resources. The paper looks to that literature to explain the effect on the Australian colonies of the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the 1850s. The price and quantity adjustments predicted by the model are found to be well supported by the historical experience with one important exception. Immigration played a far greater role in the Australian case than has been suggested in the theoretical literature. The model does, however, allow for a compact description of the confusing decade in Australian history and explains a number of previously unconnected phenomena.

The managerial revolution resulted in the concentration of production decisions in the hands of management. Radical economists and historians have disputed the conventional view that these changes in work organization were necessary to increase production efficiency. Yet curiously there seem to be few issues of fact in dispute between the radical and the conventional accounts. I offer here an interpretation of the radical position which explains why this is so, and why profitable and efficient organizations of work will differ in capitalist economies. The argument hinges on the conditions under which workers were able to act collectively.