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.

Financial relationships between the federal government and the states were a critical matter in the founding and early operations of the federal government under the Constitution, with the settlement of the Revolutionary War debt the object of chief concern. When the debt was ultimately secured, other matters arose to keep funds passing from one level of government to another. Some of these were of major political importance, while others involving substantial sums made little political impact, being less controversial.

The initiating forces and contributing factors in the contraction of economic activity during the Great Depression have received a good deal of attention from students of economic history. The occurrence of concomitant falls in the price level and income level during the 1929–1934 depression period has often been cited as evidence of the real-balance effect's lack of empirical significance. In light of the recent developments in monetary theory regarding the contribution of demand deposit creation to net wealth, some reappraisal of the role of monetary wealth as a stabilizing influence in the depression period seems in order. The purpose of this article is to examine the endogenous determinants of the deposit ratios during a severe economic downturn and their relation to cyclical changes in the price level by which changes in business activity affect the stock of demand deposits, bank reserves, and thus the stock of bonds held by banks.

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 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.

Technological progress has long been widely recognized as a crucial source of economic growth. Many countries have, accordingly, devoted considerable resources to promote more rapid generation and diffusion of technology in their economies. Yet recent studies reveal a persistence of stark contrasts across countries and geographic space more generally, not only in productivity, but also in the generation of new technological knowledge. What accounts for these geographic disparities is not well understood.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.

This essay explores the state of economic knowledge regarding the development of household economic life in the United States since early industrialization by examining explanations for the low labor-force participation of middle-class married women prevailing until the 1940s. These explanations, including those emerging from fertility studies and resting on market forces, imprecisely specify the domestic roles of housewives. Interdisciplinary specification of these roles, drawing on social and cultural historians, and rigorous measurement of time allocation within the household would help resolve the various interpretations and assist in estimating the contribution of household work to social product.

We study the impact of the 1907 Panic, the most severe economic crisis before the Great Depression, on the selection of Mexican immigration. We find that migrants were positively selected on height before the crisis. This pattern changed to negative selection during the crisis but returned to positive selection afterward. Adjustments in selection were partially mediated by the enganche, a historical labor-recruiting system that reduced migration costs but only for taller laborers with above-average earnings potential. We document that labor recruiting contributed to maintaining the relatively constant height profile of the migration flow in the short run.

When one reviews the literature that has appeared since 1945 relating to American economic history in the period from 1861 to 1900, the trends of scholarly interest and investigation are not entirely clear. The volume of output appears to have diminished and the incidence of interest to have shifted. Postwar publication seems more notable for the appearance, in diverse fields, of some distinguished monographs than for more general studies of the economy or its major components. It may be that the interest of scholars has shifted from this to other chronological periods, but it seems reasonably clear that research in the history of agriculture, public policies, financial institutions, and the relative status of major income groups has declined. There is evident, on the other hand, increased interest in the history of business enterprise, and this concern has been reflected in the appearance of numerous studies of entrepreneurship as well as of histories of individual corporations. It is perhaps significant that in this series of review articles the one exception to the chronological division of United States history is the article devoted to business history. This segregation operates to relieve me of the duty of reviewing the new literature in a field that was obviously of great significance in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. I should say, however, that it has seemed necessary to cite or discuss some few works of particular significance for my analysis.