In 1940 the Ford Motor Company employed half of the black men in Detroit but only 14 percent of the whites. We find that black Detroiters were concentrated at Ford because they were excluded from working elsewhere. Those most affected were young married black men. A Ford job was virtually the only opportunity they had to earn a family wage; but to keep it, they had to put out the extra effort that Ford required. White married men in Detroit had better employment opportunities elsewhere, so they tended to avoid Ford or leave very quickly.

This article reappraises export performance on international markets before World War I by examinnig the case of cotton textiles. The German industry expanded its market share from the 1850s to 1914 despite remaining a high-cost industry relative to Great Britain. Evidence from contemporary accounts and analysis of trade data from 1913 suggests that German success arose in part from the importance of monopolistic competition in export markets for finished cloth. Germany’s relative wealth, geographic position, and perhaps the intensive marketing efforts of its industry may have enabled it to counter the cost advantage of its British rival.

Their heads are still gay with crimson kerchiefs, but those kerchiefs do not come from Manchester.

—E. E. Williams

Infant mortality data gathered from the registers of nine parishes in the industrial North of England are used as a concrete indicator of living standards for the early nineteenth century. Rising infant mortality in the sample parishes provides evidence that the standard of living was not improving substantially in these towns up to midcentury. This conclusion remains after considering the effect on mortality of population growth, climate, and feeding practices.

Historians argue that in late eighteenth-century North Aerica, apprentices often ran away form their masters. Masters’ inability to write enforceable contracts, the argument goes, sparked the decline of traditional apprenticeships. This article addresses the issue of enforcement. I analyze an apprentice’s incentive to run away and the role of enforcement with detailed archival evidence form Montreal. These data cast doubt on the claim that masters were unable to construct enforceable contracts and call into question the severity of a runaway problem.

This article uses the records of the Dow Chemical Company to analyze the role of distributors in facilitating collusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It compares collusion in three closely related markets: salt, bromine, and bleach. Where national distributors with well-established reputations had facilitated the entry of small producers into integrated markets, distributors could also facilitate collusion. Mass-producing entrants, like Dow, joined collusive distribution arrangements while improving their innovative production processes. In the longer run, they integrated forward to escape the output restrictions and arms-length relationship with customers imposed by collusive agreements.

The Bank of England depleted its open-market portfolio by secretly sterilizing large gold inflows. Thereafter interest rates were influenced by manipulating reported gold flows. Expectations manipulation as a monetary policy channel is modeled and estimated. A gold flow falsification was over two-thirds as effective as an open-market operation. These results contradict accepted new classical models and suggest that credibility benefits from new classical policy are small, despite current popularity among central bankers. The episode supports Peter Temin’s view of interwar central bankers as nonstabilizers and enforcers of a dysfunctional classical orthodoxy.

Steven Hahn, in his influential book The Roots of Southern Populism, viewed Populism in the Georgia Up-country as the culmination of a long-standing protest against the economic and social effects of commercialization in regions that were relatively isolated prior to the Civil War. In developing his explanation for the rise of Populism, Hahn emphasized the close relationship between voting for Populism in the 1890s and voting to keep the range open in the 1880s. The traditional agricultural practice in the South through the Civil War was to allow animals to roam the countryside freely and to force farmers to erect fences around their crops.

In a recent article in this JOURNAL, Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White (hereafter R-W) conclude that, “while there is still room for skepticism [of the presence of a bubble in the boom and bust stock market of 1928/29], the traditional accounts of a bubble in the market cannot be so easily dismissed”.1 Their conclusion is not based on econometric evidence for a stock market bubble per Se. Instead, it is based solely on their interpretation of the widening spread between the interest rates on brokers’ loans (call and time loans collateralized by stocks and bonds) and other money market interest rates in 1928 and 1929.

Research in finance is guided by powerful intuitions from models of efficient markets. However, researchers have uncovered a number of puzzles that are not explained by these models. Such anomalies include the excess volatility of stock prices, the closed-end mutual fund paradox, and the mean reversion in stock prices that produces predictable returns for long holding periods.1 Whereas financial economists all recognize the existence of these puzzles, they disagree about how they can be explained. Robert J. Shiller argues, for example, that efficient-markets models cannot hope to explain these anomalies and looks to alternatives that incorporate fads.2 In contrast, John H. Cochrane believes that the puzzles can be explained by improved models of fundamentals.3

Our best estimates fail to reveal significant quantitative changes in the level of macroeconomic variables (such as per capita output or the savings rate) for Britain during the eighteenth century.1 Efforts that investigate economic activity at the industrial level are, therefore, well placed if the concept of Industrial Revolution is to remain useful. For example, N. F. R. Crafts and T. C. Mills use a segmented quadratic-trend model of industrial production and find that the trend rate of growth accelerated in 1776.2 In addition, my own research has revealed trend acceleration for industrial-level patented invention in the 1760-to-1790 period, which is consistent with Joel Mokyr’s argument that the essence of the Industrial Revolution was a cluster of pivotal “macroinventions” made in this period.3

Historians and economists have long been in need of index numbers to measure both the volume (real value) of activity that is undertaken to produce process or product innovations over time, and also a counterpart index that might capture the outcome of that activity (the volume of inventions) that come on stream year after year. For purposes of measurement the first index can in principle be equated (within tolerable limits of accuracy) with the real annual expenditures on research and development as recorded (at least for recent times) in governmental, corporate, company, and other accounts. Alas, for years before 1914 national or even industry-wide research and development expenditures are very rarely recorded in a form that might allow for the construction of an index number.

The past 20 years have witnessed a thorough reassessment of the basic features of nineteenth-century Ireland’s economic experience. Much of this reassessment was focused on the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the post-Famine period (which means, for the purposes of this essay, from the Great Famine to the Great War) has undergone its own quieter but no less complete reassessment. The two books under review here convey the flavor of this new research.

Every so often a maverick knight sets off into the dark forest looking for the Holy Grail of “why isn’t the whole world developed?” In this book, which has the heavy bibliographical armor of the genre and 40 pages of appendices too, John Powelson reports on his quest. He claims to have found in a concept called “power diffusion” a significant part of the answer to two related questions: why did the modem economy first appear in northwestern Europe and Japan, and what characteristics of those regions account for their ability to sustain economic growth? Growth is to him the serendipitous outcome of seemingly unconnected events, and he defines sustained growth as that which lasts a century or more.

Is it worthwhile to read biographies of economists? Does the person’s life affect the formulation of his or her theory? How much influence can a person have on the sweep of history? These, of course, are some of the oldest questions scholars grapple with, whether in the guise of the New Criticism in literature, the role of individual contributions to the progress of science, or the balance between volition and determinism in history itself.