This research examines whether an alternative exchange rate policy could have mitigated Germany’s recession from April 1930 to May 1932, when Heinrich Brüning was Reichskanzler of the Weimar Republic. Using an open-economy dynamic model as our analytical framework, we examine the arguments against adopting the devaluation policy. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that a widely held belief—that floating the Reichsmark would have led to high inflation—is unwarranted. Despite Germany’s high foreign debt, floating the Reichsmark would have led to less of a decline in both real GDP and employment for the country during the Great Depression.

With the word information on nearly everyone's lips, it seems an opportune time for historians to finally join the bandwagon and bless this new factor of production that apparently is giving rise to a “new economy.” (And they had better do so fast, before the darkening clouds of recession rain on the parade.) In this book, experts drawn from history departments and business schools take a look back at how we got to the present, and more than that, the unique role that information has played in economics, business, politics, and culture in the United States.

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.

I am going to begin by asking a theoretical question or, if this term appears too ambitious, I am going first to circumscribe by way of generalization the role of business administration in economic development. In the second instance the hypotheses so gained will be tested through application to the history of American banking administration between 1780 and 1914. However, before starting on this task we must agree about the terminology to be used, since the word “administration” may connote either a series of actions, namely, the practice of administering something, or the personnel which professionally administers, say, a business enterprise or a public agency or the like. The same holds true mutatis mutandis of the term “management” which in this paper will have a specific meaning. I am going to apply both connotations to the terms administration and management, but in such a way that no misunderstanding is possible.

Apprenticeship was, at one time, the foremost means of acquiring skill in North America and Europe. Today it is rare in North America for reasons that are not well understood. I draw on the population of apprentice contracts signed in Montreal over a 50-year period to pinpoint the start of the decline and explore its origins. I find that the decline began around 1815. During its first phase masters responded to greater difficulties in contract enforcement. A direct effect of the rise of larger establishments on the market for apprentices appears later, in the late 1820s and 1830s.

Among the national unions that grew up in the decade after the Civil War none made so great an impression on the public mind during its career as the Knights of St. Crispin. Like all transitional movements, die order combined nostalgia for the past with a daring experimentalism in confronting the cordwainers' problems. Previous histories have neglected its forward-looking aspect, perhaps because the harking back to what was lost was eloquently set forth in publications, while the experiments are found in the practices of local unions, little understood even by those who made them. Only in the perspective of time can we see how much more significant were the actions of the rank and file than the speeches and editorials of tradition-bound leaders.