Single women dominated the U.S. female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of single women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of their earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task-oriented and payment was frequently by the piece. Earnings rose steeply with experience and peaked early; learning was mainly on-the-job. Occupational segregation by sex was a partial product of the method of payment, and the early termination of human capital investment was a function of the life-cycle labor force participation of these women, although the role of the family was also critical.

In a recent paper in this Journal, James Millar and Susan Linz seek “to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.” They argue that Soviet direct estimates of non-human war cost (capital loss plus direct war outlays plus wartime loss of national income), made by a postwar Extraordinary Commission, imply a cost per employed member of the 1940 population of 7.4 years' earnings. Their own indirect approximation of war cost—based on a construct which incorporates estimates of prewar and wartime propensities to consume and invest, a 30 percent capital loss claimed by the Soviets, and an assumed capital-output ratio of 3—is 3.9 years' earnings. After hypothesizing various values for their parameters, they conclude that “[t]he popular Soviet claim that World War II cost ‘two Five-Year Plans’ is, therefore, above the upper limit [6.0 years' earnings] of the range of the total war cost estimates calculated using Soviet national income data.”2 The implication is that their results cast significant doubt on “the reasonableness” of Soviet claims of war cost. This paper will demonstrate that if the Soviet direct estimate of war cost is properly expressed in Sovietmeasured 1940 consumption years, Millar-Linz's perceived divergence between the Soviet direct and their indirect estimate of war cost disappears.

Susan Linz and I are fascinated, if somewhat puzzled, by Edward Saraydar's comments on our research note “The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People” (this Journal, 38 [Dec. 1978]). His comment demonstrates what we ourselves discovered: that there are many ways to measure war costs. We are pleased to note that Saraydar apparently accepts the fundamental conception that we presented of the cost of the war to the population. We are also pleased to see that, despite his criticisms, the range we presented for the cost of the war (that is, 3.2 to 7.4 years' earnings of the 1940 Soviet labor force) stands up quite well as lower and upper bounds.

Between the years 1940 and 1947 the demand for female labor in the United States shifted rapidly. Wages for women rose swiftly during the war, then fell suddenly when industries converted to peacetime production. This paper makes use of household production theory to explore the behavior of different segments of the female labor force as they responded to the radical changes in demand brought by World War II. The analysis suggests that a crucial turning point in the efforts to hire women was reached in the second half of 1943.

Two financial missions to Colombia headed by Edwin W. Kemmerer are examined to determine their impact on Colombia's financial system and on the flow of American investment to Colombia. The 1923 and 1930 missions established a central bank and completely reorganized the Colombian financial and fiscal system. These reforms served to provide enough stability to encourage American investment, which helped to develop a financial and economic infrastructure in Colombia.

This study constructs indexes of productivity change to show that the yield of prairie farm land fell, in some cases as much as 25 percent, while the productivity of non-land inputs rose 300 percent or more from 1900 to 1930. It was this latter productivity growth, rather than the supply of prairie wheat land emphasized by the “staples approach” to Canadian economic history, that made the western prairie profitable to farm, and that contributed most to expanding the supply of prairie wheat. Much of the post-World War I expansion of settlement was on the drier and relatively low yielding parts of the Canadian prairie.