The textbook explanation for Britain's high unemployment in the 1920s is that the return to gold at $4.86 left the currency overvalued. Recent estimates suggest that an 11 percent devaluation would have eliminated roughly half the unemployment in 1925. This article questions the validity of that conclusion. It measures the power of exchange rate devaluations to decrease unemployment in the context of sectorally distinct labor markets. The results suggest that though a devaluation would have been helpful, eliminating half of 1925's unemployment would have required one much greater than 11 percent and would have caused significant price pressures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This analysis of the condition of the working classes in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century is provided in two stages. An average real wage index for 1810–1840 exhibits a marked decline as a result of the high proportion of textile workers in the labor force. Quality indicators, such as housing conditions and mortality rates, deteriorated, and working-class diets at best did not improve. The evidence examined for Glasgow suggests no improvement in the standard of living of the city's working-class population.

The problem of the distribution of the agrarian product in feudalism is not at all new. It has been raised frequently by European historians and at the beginning of the 1930's led to a scientific controversy in Poland. The following article sets itself two tasks: first, to acquaint the American reader with contributions to the subject that may not be known in this country; second, to suggest an economic theory applicable to the problem. Not being an economist by profession, I will not attempt a theoretical analysis at length, but I hope, by a discussion of various approaches to the problem, to bring us closer to a solution.

To discuss the influence of one type of economic activity such as transportation on economic growth is a hazardous undertaking. There is the obvious temptation, which has led many astray, to magnify the importance of that which is particularized. Such a characterization as “Transportation a Measure of Civilization” or the assertion that the railway “is a revolution among nations … [a] moral revolution … affecting the diffusion of knowledge, the interchange of social relations, the perpetuation of peace, the extension of commerce; and a revolution in all the relations of property,” is hardly impartial or balanced with respect to the whole picture of economic activity. A prime objective of this paper is to avoid the dominant parochial note in appraisals of transportation's contributions to economic growth and to present instead thoroughly critical analysis.

My two predecessors assure me that our association is too young to possess any precedents or traditions. In the matter of themes for presidential addresses the only foreshadow of a tradition seems to be the cult of variety and free choice. My own choice of subject is therefore influenced by the fact that during the past year I have been writing a biography of our first president and America's first native-born thoroughly trained economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. As I followed the career of one member of our guild in the making, comparisons with others would persist in cropping up, and the question took shape: “What are economic historians made of?”