Locomotive inspection was among the most important Progressive Era federal workplace regulations. Inspection rules were enforced by a new Bureau of Locomotive Inspection, which claimed credit for subsequent safety improvements. Relying on published and unpublished data this article assesses these claims. Literary sources suggest that the bureau achieved compliance by emphasizing regulatory benefits and that its activities sharply reduced locomotive defects through the 1920s, in part by reducing agency problems. A model for 1923–1932 reinforces this conclusion, but suggests that the safety gains came at high cost. After 1932 safety improvements stagnated, for inspection ran out of steam.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.

Ann Capling's book deals with Australia's role in the design of the global trade system, from the post-1945 negotiations over the (aborted) International Trade Organization (ITO), up to the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. She draws primarily on Australian sources, such as memoranda, reminiscences, and interviews with Australian participants in the negotiation process. The story has not been told before in such detail, and the book will become a standard work on how Australia conducted its international economic diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century.

Secure property rights are usually considered to be essential for sustained economic development. In England, it is debated whether property rights have been secure since the medieval period or if they were only established after the Glorious Revolution. In this context, the paper examines the Court of Wards, which from 1540 to 1646 administered the Crown’s right to take custody of children and their lands when these were held by feudal-military tenures. The paper shows that wardship was a common occurrence, its exactions arbitrary but often heavy, and that it reduced the value of lands held by these tenures.

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.This dissertation was completed in September 1999 in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Russell R. Menard and Steven Ruggles. Financial support was provided by a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians.”

We study labor earnings inequality during the Great Depression using establishment-level information from the Census of Manufactures (COM). Inequality, as measured by the interquartile range in earnings per worker, declines by 10 log points between 1929 and 1933. However, by 1935, this difference has recovered to its 1929 level. In a decomposition, this decline and then rise in inequality is entirely explained by returns to observable factors, most notably the skill premium and regional differentials. The exit of establishments plays an important role in the initial decline in inequality but barely any role in the recovery.

Is it possible for an underdeveloped area to construct democratic parliamentary organs as the means of allocating central political authority in a society, simultaneously widi the pursuit of rapid economic development? This is what we shall examine in the following discussion. That the problem is of significance can perhaps readily be conceded. It has implications for the colonial policy of those Western nations that still have large territorial holdings in many diverse parts of the globe. It assumes more crucial significance as colonial empires disintegrate under the combined pressures of economic and political demands by nationalists and as competing ideologies find service in the cause of independence.

The Federal Tariff of 1901 marked the first of numerous interventions by the Australian government designed to stimulate the production of finished motor vehicles. It was unsuccessful, as was the “Tudor” Tariff of 1911, which imposed a specific duty on body imports; war conditions in 1917 led to an embargo on imports of motor vehicles. Thereafter, the government's need for revenue, which favored protectionist measures generally, in combination with a defense policy that deemed engine production to be of strategic importance, underpinned a series of government measures intended to promote local vehicle production. One effect of the “Green” Tariff in 1920, which afforded protection to manufacturing in general, was to attract American assemblers. By that time, the fierce and often clandestine clash of pressure groups representing special interests, within government, and within the motor industry (broadly defined to include local suppliers of components and equipment, from tires to electrical fittings), had become an important influence on policy. In several instances, the effects were both perverse and hilarious. A fragmented and inefficient industry operated within effective tariff protection, of which the principal beneficiaries were American multinationals. The “complete car project” of the 1930s was a failure, though it was revived under wartime conditions in the 1940s. With subsidies in mind, the government persuaded reluctant American and British producers to submit plans for full car manufacture, the first to do so being GM-H, the Australian subsidiary of General Motors (incorporating Holdens, the, long-established local body manufacturer).

This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5 percent.