It is not every day that I am asked to review a book that discusses telephone sex.

Black families included in the 1918/19 BLS Consumer Purchases Survey used installment credit more frequently and merchant credit less frequently than White families. Economic and demographic characteristics explain the racial difference for installment but not for merchant credit. I argue greater demand for installment credit by Black families was satisfied because repossession of collateral upon buyer default overcame merchants' personal prejudice with regard to creditworthiness, but absence of tangible collateral impacted the availability of merchant credit. Low use of merchant credit can account for relatively high interwar saving rates for low-income Black families.

Credit financing of automobile sales and dealer inventories was provided primarily by hundreds of sales finance companies in the interwar United States. The few finance companies tied to auto manufacturers wrote 90 percent of credit business. Manufacturers initially established finance companies not to bolster retail sales but to finance dealers' wholesale inventory so manufacturers could lower average costs by smoothing seasonal production patterns. Moreover, until the Justice Department intervened, manufacturers apparently illegally coerced franchised dealers into using the manufacturer's preferred finance company rather than an independent.

Comparing the dating of turning points of fertility with real wage trends for the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Wrigley and Schofield reported that an average of 50 years elapsed between changes in real wages and in fertility. Using a formal statistical procedure, it is shown that over these three centuries the average lag length was closer to 16 years. With eighteenth-century regional wage data the estimates of average lag length range between 12 and 16 years.