Empirical evidence from the Third World on the impact of early industrialization on welfare has produced new ideas on relations between growth, distribution, and the quality of life. Historical welfare must also be reassessed with less emphasis on material living standards. Distribution should be more systematically analyzed, and quality of life indicators considered. By adopting the approach, historians will revitalize old debates and make these more relevant to issues in modern development studies. Historians also need to investigate welfare themes in recent and comparative history to a greater extent than hitherto, which requires closer integration between economic, social, and political history.

This paper analyzes the transition from agents to branch selling as alternative institutional modes for transacting abroad by pre-1939 British manufacturing multinationals. A model to explain the shift between alternative modes is specified in terms of transaction costs. Agent opportunism and contract monitoring costs are the major transaction costs. Besides transaction costs, the frequency of transactions and the accumulation of market-specific knowledge by the principal were found to be important variables.

The survivor technique is applied to a virtually complete set of plant and output data to determine the extent of scale economies in the plug, smoking, snuff, and fine-cut branches of the tobacco industry between 1897 and 1910. The data indicate that the relative cost advantage of large tobacco factories was substantial, with facilities of minimum efficient size often requiring market shares approaching 10 per cent of U. S. output. These results support one of the principal themes of The Visible Hand—that the realization of scale economies motivated the consolidation movement in American manufacturing at the turn of the century.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s southern landlords began to replace sharetenants and mules with wage laborers and large-scale preharvest machinery. Informed observers in the 1920s did not expect this to happen until the advent of the mechanical cotton picker, which came after World War I. This paper presents evidence supporting the claim that the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the economic depression they were designed to cure, induced this tenant displacement by increasing the asset value of land rights without securing tenants a share right, and by relaxing the harvest labor constraint that had previously impeded mechanization.

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.

Developments in industrial organization contributed to the lack of diversification in Britain's older industrial areas during the interwar period. The large-scale firm had not yet developed in appropriate industries to the point where large numbers of branch plants could be sent to the depressed areas (as they were after World War II), even if interwar macroeconomic policy had been more expansionary. At the industry level, barriers to new entrants and restrictive practices were high in the 1930s, precisely the period when the need for structural change in the depressed areas was most apparent.

Kikuchi and Hayami found that irrigation investments were undertaken in East and Southeast Asia when the costs of increasing output through irrigating were lower than through bringing more land under cultivation. In Thailand, however, despite the lower costs of irrigation, the investments were postponed for several decades. The delay was due to a divergence between national security and economic development goals and to a conflict of private versus public interests. The results highlight the importance of the returns to decision makers in determining the amount and timing of public investments.

The first measurements in the 1920s of living standards of American farmers were not outgrowths of mere curiosity. As implemented by a new breed of social scientist in the USDA's Bureau of Agricultural Economics, especially Ellis Kirkpatrick, they were instruments of social Darwinism: keep the “higher” or “cerebral” type of farmer down on the farm by paying him parity prices.

The literature on the development of American industrial research suggests that during the twentieth century large firms “dominated” industrial research, and reaped the majority of the benefits from such activity. This paper utilizes new data to analyze both the relationship between firm size and research employment and the impact of research activity on firm growth and survival during 1921–1946. The results suggest that large firms were no more research-intensive than were small firms during the 1921–1946 period. Research activity significantly enhanced the probability of firms' survival among the ranks of the 200 largest manufacturing firms during 1921–1946. Research employment also improved the growth performance of both large and small firms during 1933–1946.

The proportion of a household's budget spent on diet has commonly served as an important measure of material welfare. This paper pulls together data concerning trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draws comparisons with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage assessments, a new source for estimating the proportion of outlays devoted to diet, is examined. The impact on food expenditures of new commodities and other dietary shifts is also explored. The findings call into question earlier estimates of the proportion of total expenditure devoted to food and drink in the pre-industrial period and the assumption that food expenditures are always inelastic.