British shipbuilding enjoyed undisputed international supremacy between 1890 and 1914. Following a gradual loss of world market share during the interwar years, Britain sustained an absolute decline in output between 1948 and 1970. European shipbuilding expanded at an unprecedented rate after World War II. This article attributes Britain's dramatic competitive decline in part to management's uncertaintly about the need to reform work administration methods during the decade or so following world War II, and in part to lack of trust between labor and management, which resulted in a failure of cooperation over proposed institutional reform between 1958 and 1965.

The usual picture of the medieval peasantry is based on nineteenth-century scholarship, which has proven difficult to dislodge from educated minds. This article continues the revision of an important detail in the picture, the scattering of plots in open fields. Some recent work on the subject by Robert Allen and Gregory Clark is midly disputed, and new evidence is presented that risk avoidance is the key to understanding peasant behavior. The reason for the scattering was not sentiment or socialism. Peasants were not perhaps rational in every detail; but they were prudent.

Based on the cost savings of tractors relative to horses, nearly twice as many farmers in the Corn Belt should have invested in tractors as actually did so in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, however, the proportion of farmers owning tractors jumped from 25 to 40 percent. I argue that financial barriers explain farmers' reluctance to buy this expensive invention during the 1920s, while two New Deal regulatory agencies altered farmers' investment climate and spurred the adoption of capital equipment.

Explanations for the recent decline in the labor force attachment of males 65 years of age and older include the introduction of Old Age and Survivors Insurance and the growth in private pension programs. Neither hypothesis can explain the sizable decline that occurred between 1930 and 1950, when aggregate social security and private pension payments were small. Estimates from pooled state aggregate data indicate that the means-tested Old Age Assistance program established by the Social Security Act of 1935 significantly increased retirement activity in this period, particularly among low-income individuals.

This article examines the determinants of interprefectural patterns of Japanese emigration to the U.S. Pacific Northwest, using a multiple regression analysis. In estimating the regression equations, new proxies are introduced for the “family- and-friends” effect that are free of the statistical problems common in previous studies on long-distance migration. The result shows that the information networks that developed between pioneer immigrants and their home districts played a central role in shaping emigration patterns. The lack of an alternative means of obtaining reliable information about conditions in the United States appears to be responsible.

The Anglo-Irish Economic War of 1932 to 1938 was eventually settled on terms highly favorable to the Irish. This article uses a computational general equilibrium model of the interwar Irish economy to argue that the welfare costs of the war were not so great as has been thought, and that the dispute helped de Valera electorally. These considerations help explain the eventual Irish “victory” in the Economic War.

We employed data on the heights of English and Irish male convicts transported to Australia to assess the living standards of workers between 1770 and 1815. Falling heights of urban-and rural-born males after 1780 and a delayed growth spurt for 13- to 23-year-old boys revealed declining living standards among English workers during the Industrial Revolution. This conclusion was supported by the fall in English workers' heights relative to that of convicts transported from Ireland. Significant urban-rural and regional variations in English living standards were revealed by using regression techniques.

Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental” values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that the stocks making up the S & P composite were priced at least 30 percent above fundamentals in late summer, 1929.

Various states in the Holy Roman Empire prepared for the Thirty Years' War by creating new mints and debasing the subsidiary coinage. The process spread through Gresham's Law: bad money was taken by debasing states to their neighbors and exchanged for good. The neighbor typically defended itself by debasing its own coin. The resulting hyperinflation was terminated early in the war by an agreement to return to the Imperial Augsburg Ordinance of 1559. The Kipper- und Wipperzeit, as the period is called, illuminates the geographic spread of financial crises, German hypennflations of this century, and current proposals for “free banking.”

Britain's textile industry contracted sharply in the interwar period due to the growth of domestic industries in many of its export markets. Lazonick and Mass argue that, because this growth was inevitable, British entrepreneurs should not have focused on the less developed countries. This article questions whether the interwar growth of the Indian textile industry was inevitable. A quantitative study of Indian import demand and production techniques suggests that the rapid growth of the industry was due to exogenous events—postwar British inflation and change in the Indian political regime—rather than to the natural evolution of Indian productivity.

The continued importance of tenant plantations in some areas of the South since the Civil War suggests that there was some advantage to large-scale agriculture. One source of economies of scale was in the marketing of high-quality cotton.

We examine U.S. agricultural policy as an institutional choice. Price controls in World War I had demonstrated the government's influence in markets, and with falling crop prices in the 1920s, farmers appealed to the federal government. The federal government was large enough by then to intervene in variou ways. It could have assisted private cooperatives by providing antitrust exemptions, market information, and enforcement of cooperative rules or intervened directly with mandatory output reductions and targeted prices. The policies adopted were influenced by crop-specific characteristics and broader market conditions affecting the success of private cooperatives.