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Whereas the emergence of the classical gold standard (1870‒1914) has attracted considerable attention in the economic literature, only very few authors have inquired into the protracted confidence crisis of silver. Building on the results of Calomiris, Oppers, and Flandreau, this book explores the evolution of management practice in exchange banks in Asia. Using ‘forensic accounting’, it attempts to show that contemporaries were aware of problems caused by the gyrations of the silver price after 1870, and that they sought to actively remedy their harmful effects on trade between gold and silver using countries. It describes how the experiment with financial instruments, although originally mishaps, eventually led to success. Next, and contrary to the commonly held belief that nineteenth-century bankers did not have a sophisticated understanding of hedging strategies, it shows, in a quantitative way, that hedging strategies existed, impacting banks’ operations in profound ways. More specifically, it uses the mostly unexplored accounting data and archives of the Yokohama Specie Bank (YSB; the world’s third largest exchange bank before World War II) to describe the bank’s wrought management history in the tumultuous years around the turn of the twentieth century. YSB had to come to grips with Japan’s effort at adopting the gold standard (1897), the difficult expansionary ‘postbellum administration’ after the Sino-Japanese War (1894‒5), and the consolidation of the country’s imperialism (after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904‒5)—all events shaping not only the bank’s operations and expansion in Asia, but also affecting the organization of its branch network and management of its flow-of-funds.

The population base in both the United States and Japan is growing older and, as those populations age, they provoke heretofore unexamined economic consequences. This comparative volume, the third in the joint series offered by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Japan Center for Economic Research, explores those consequences, drawing specific attention to four key areas: incentives for early retirement; savings, wealth, and asset allocation over the life cycle; health care and health care reform; and population projections. Given the undeniable global importance of the Japanese and U.S. economies, these chapters shed light on the complex correlations between aging and economic behavior. This work not only deepens our understanding of the Japanese and American economic landscapes but, through careful examination of the comparative social and economic data, clarifies the complex relation between aging societies, public policies, and economic outcomes.

This book is a history of the role of information in the United States since roughly 1870, when the nation was well on its way to a nearly 150-year period of economic prosperity, technological and scientific transformations often collectively called the Second Industrial Revolution, and to a significant role in global affairs. Citizens and their institutions used information extensively as tools in support of the nation’s evolution during these decades. This book does for information what a general diplomatic or economic history of the country accomplishes when telling the story of America. It goes just as far in arguing that information’s role has been a critical component of the work, play, and culture of this nation. This book is a narrative history, a description, a catalog of the American experience. It also departs from the widely accepted concept of knowledge as important in American life. The introduction lays out the case for embracing the concept of information, instead of the more widely used word, knowledge. Looking at information, and not just knowledge, allows us to reveal crucial daily activities of people and organizations. An introduction describes a model demonstrated chronologically and thematically in the next 11 chapters. The last chapter summarizes key findings and implications. This book is designed so that it can be read cover to cover or in bits and pieces. All the Facts draws upon the research of many others, so it can be read as an introduction to what is a broad, extensive topic. It is the first general history of how Americans used information, and serves as a model for how other national information histories could be written.

American Opinion on Trade: Preferences without Politics explains how American voters form opinions on trade policy and why those preferences can remain at odds with policy choices of political actors and parties who depend on their votes. The book shows that Americans weave together distinct and at times countervailing beliefs about trade’s effect on themselves, their communities, and the country. Initial chapters describe gender, race, and community based sources of protectionist sentiment. Later chapters focus on media and campaign portrayals of trade and their influence on Americans’ continued negative perception of the effect of trade on American jobs even as the United States continues to promote policies sustaining globalization. The final chapter discusses the difficulty faced by politicians and parties navigating these diverse and malleable sources of trade sentiment, particularly when encumbered with voting histories supportive of trade liberalization. It identifies party convergence on trade as a source of the diminished salience in American politics and compares the American experience with that of eight other advanced industrial economies. The book concludes by noting the potential for the reemerging influence of trade policy, particularly in light of the return of trade discourse in the 2016 Presidential campaigns.

This book is about fundamental economic theory, but it maintains that economics is meaningless outside the framework of history.

It therefore analyses the evolution of some leading economies since the Industrial Revolution.

It opens with a critical discussion of some earlier attempts to expound a theory of history, notably, the so‐called ‘new economic history’ or ‘cliometrics’ and then the ideas of two outstanding social scientists—Kondratiev and Schumpeter.

They were both concerned with major qualitative as well as quantitative changes in evolving economic systems, with the explanation of such revolutionary transformations and with their periodization.

Our book too is concerned with exploring these problems, but it offers deep criticism both of Kondratiev's ‘long wave’ theory and of Schumpeter's attempt to reconcile this theory with the equilibrium models of Walras.

Like Keynes, we emphasize some of the limitations of purely econometric models and insist on the great importance of ‘semi‐autonomous’ institutions and subsystems of society, which influence the economy and are influenced by it in a process of mutual interaction and adjustment.

Although in recent times the technology subsystem has been extremely dynamic and influential in the evolution of the economy, it is essential to consider also the political, cultural, and science subsystems, all of which have a vital role in achieving that degree of congruence in the social system necessary for successful economic growth.

This approach is illustrated in those chapters of the book that are devoted to a historical account of five successive technological revolutions, i.e. water‐powered mechanization, steam‐powered mechanization, electrification, motorization, and computerization.

Statistical evidence of the great significance of these technological revolutions for structural change in the economy is found in the changing composition of the leading cohort of the hundred largest firms.

Evidence of the social conflicts and tensions engendered by each structural crisis of adjustment is found in the statistics of days lost in strikes, as well as in political conflicts over the regulatory regime and in international markets.

This book tells the story of an academic department that underwent rapid, wrenching changes at a time and in a place that one would not have expected them to have occurred. The time was the late 1960s through the 1970s and the place was a US public university heavily dependent on state funding. The Cold War was raging, the US public was fearful of communism and the Soviet Union, and politicians were speaking to these fears for political ends. And the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was in turmoil. In this environment a significant proportion of that department's visible faculty of traditional economists was rapidly created and, in spite of the anti-Marxist political climate and the dependence of the University on state politicians for funding, quickly replaced by a significant visible group of Marxian economists. The story told covers the particulars of the background for these events relating to the University of Massachusetts, the political activism of the period, and the state of the economics profession. It describes the events themselves in considerable detail, the multi-year turmoil within the Economics Department associated with them, the eventual resolution of that turmoil into an intellectually exciting and friendly atmosphere, the significance of the events in terms of academic endeavor, and their legacy for the economics profession.

Following an unprecedented economic boom fed by foreign investment, the Russian Revolution triggered the worst sovereign default in history. This book tells the dramatic story of this boom and bust, chronicling the forgotten experiences of leading financiers of the age. Shedding critical new light on the decision making of the powerful personalities who acted as the gatekeepers of international finance, the book explains how they channeled foreign capital into Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While economists have long relied on quantitative analysis to grapple with questions relating to the drivers of cross-border capital flows, this book adopts an historical approach, drawing on banking and government archives in four countries. It provides rare insights into the thinking of influential figures in world finance as they sought to navigate one of the most challenging and lucrative markets of the first modern age of globalization. The book reveals how a complex web of factors—from government interventions to competitive dynamics and cultural influences—drove a large inflow of capital during this tumultuous period in world history. The book demonstrates how the realms of finance and politics—of bankers and Bolsheviks—grew increasingly intertwined, and how investing in Russia became a political act with unforeseen repercussions.

Though the U.S. Constitution granted it the power to create a bankruptcy law, Congress did not pass the first permanent bankruptcy law until 1898. Bankruptcies rose from about one per 10,000 people annually in the first decades of the twentieth century to about one per 300 people at the turn of the twenty-first century. Bankrupt in America explains how bankruptcy evolved from an option that Congress seldom used, to an indispensable tool for businesses, to a central element of the social safety net for households, all in the span of a century. The analytical narrative unites the history of how Americans have used bankruptcy with the history of the bankruptcy law itself. The central argument is that bankruptcy law and bankruptcy rates interact over time. Bankruptcy is the last in a series of choices by debtors and creditors about borrowing, lending, repaying, and collecting debt. Changes in federal bankruptcy law, in state and federal law governing debtor-creditor relations, in local legal culture, and in the supply of credit influence the choices and lead to changes in how the bankruptcy law is used. Changes in how the bankruptcy law is used give rise to changes in beliefs and in interest groups, which in turn result in changes in the law. The interactions create an ongoing historical process of institutional change. The book traces the interactions over the twentieth century using a rich combination of statistics and documents, including recently digitized bankruptcy statistics and stories constructed from court case files.

This book documents the differential contribution of Hewlett Packard’s successive CEOs in sustaining the company’s integral process of “corporate becoming,” an open-ended ongoing process for which there is no grand ex ante plan possible and which unfolds through a series of transformations in the course of the strategic evolution of long-lived companies. A comprehensive strategic leadership framework is used to explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership; and (2) developing four key elements of the company’s strategic leadership capability. The book reveals the paradox of corporate becoming, the existential situation facing successive CEOs (which justifies the book’s empathic approach), and the importance of the CEO’s ability to harness the company’s past while also driving its future. Building on these novel insights, the book produces a dynamic theory of strategic leadership that animates an evolutionary framework of corporate becoming. This framework will be helpful for further theory development about strategic leadership and also offers practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies who intend to create, run, or oversee companies built for continued relevance, longevity, and greatness.

This is a major comparative study of big business in Britain, France and Germany across the twentieth century. It provides an analysis, based on a wealth of empirical data, of the character and performance of the major companies in each country at five benchmark years: 1907, 1927, 1953, 1972 and 1989. Particular attention is given to size, sectoral distribution, profits and profitability, and survival and growth. It also focuses on business leadership, both at professional and social levels. It considers the competence of top businessmen and major aspects of the decision‐making process, and places business elites within the context of social and political developments. It challenges widely held assumptions about, in particular, entrepreneurial failure in Britain, the power of German big business, France's backwardness and modernity, and sociocultural determinants of business performance. It concludes to a clear British advance well into the 1950s and European convergence thereafter, despite the persistence of strong national characteristics of business organization. The latter, however, are unlikely to have had much impact on the performance of each country's leading business enterprises.

This book provides a history of British financial crises since the Napoleonic wars. Interest in crises lapsed during the generally benign financial conditions which followed the Second World War, but the study of banking markets and financial crises has returned to centre stage following the credit crunch of 2007–8 and the subsequent Eurozone crisis. The first two chapters provide an overview of British financial crises from the bank failures of 1825 to the credit crunch of 2007–8. The causes and consequences of individual crises are explained and recurrent features are identified. Subsequent chapters provide more detailed accounts of the railway boom-and-bust and the subsequent financial crisis of 1847, the crisis following the collapse of Overend Gurney in 1866, the dislocation of London’s money market at the outset of the Great War in 1914 and the crisis in 1931 when sterling left the gold standard. Other chapters consider the role of regulation, banks’ capital structures, and the separation of different types of banking activity. The book examines role of the Bank of England as lender of last resort and the successes and failures of crisis management. The scope for reducing the risk of future systemic crises is assessed.

Manhattan, as the world’s greatest vertical city, is the result of a collective striving; its skyscrapers are the physical manifestation of this mass quest for success. Despite the fact that the skyscraper is inherently an economic phenomenon, there is almost no work that chronicles its economic history. This book aims to fill this void by documenting not only the “what” but also the “why,” regarding this important aspect of New York City’s history; in the process this book debunks several misconceptions about the city’s real estate history. Part I lays out the historical and institutional background that established Manhattan’s trajectory before the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. The book begins with Manhattan’s natural and geological history and then moves on to how it influenced early land use and neighborhood formation, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers. Part II focuses specifically on the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequency, locations, and shapes. The book discusses why skyscrapers emerged Downtown and why they appeared 3 miles to the north in Midtown, but not in between. The book debunks the common belief that bedrock depths were important determinants of skyscraper locations. It discusses the cause of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline.

A nation’s capital stock is widely recognized as a crucial determinant of the productivity of its workers and the standard of living of its citizens. Tracking the evolution of capital is therefore a critical input to economic history. Economist Robert E. Gallman (1926–98) gathered extensive data on US capital stock and created a legacy that has, until now, been difficult for researchers to access and appraise in its entirety. Gallman measured American capital stock from a range of perspectives, viewing it as the accumulation of income saved and invested, and as an input into the production process. He used the level and change in the capital stock as proxy measures for long-run economic performance. Analyzing data in this way from the end of the US colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century, Gallman provided a firm empirical foundation for our knowledge of the long nineteenth century—the period during which the United States began to experience per capita income growth and became a global economic leader. Gallman’s research was painstaking and his analysis meticulous, but he did not publish the material supporting his findings during his lifetime. Here Paul W. Rhode completes this project, giving permanence to a great economist’s insights and craftsmanship

This book argues that the position of women in late medieval and early modern Europe was relatively strong. This, van Zanden, De Moor, and Carmichael argue, is evident from the fact that marriage was usually based on consensus, implying that women had a clear say in their marriage. The authors analyze the medieval roots of this European Marriage Pattern, demonstrating that it was much stronger in northwestern Europe than in the Mediterranean. That women had considerable agency was one of the factors behind the rise of Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. This had huge consequences for the average age of marriage (which was very high), fertility (which was restricted by the high age of marriage), human capital formation (resulting in high levels of numeracy and literacy), and labor-force participation by women. However, the authors also explore the negative effects of the European Marriage Pattern, such as the greater vulnerability of these relatively small families, and the large group of single women, subject to external shocks particularly in old age. Special institutions emerged, such as the beguinages, to cope with these pressures. Finally, by comparing these European households with household patterns in the rest of Eurasia, this book puts the European Marriage Pattern into global perspective.

During the 20th century, a view established itself, according to which (a) defining central banking would be difficult, (b) the Sveriges Riksbank (established in 1668) and the Bank of England (established in 1694) would have been the first central banks, (c) although at that time central banks did not have a policy mandate and no concept of central banking would have existed before the 19th century. This book challenges these views and rehabilitates pre-1800 central banking, including the role of numerous other institutions, mainly on the European continent. Central banking should be defined as being associated with the issuance of “central bank money”, i.e. financial money of the highest possible credit quality, that is accepted for settlement of any other financial claim in the same way as species money is accepted as it is considered credit, liquidity and market risk free, to use modern terminology. Issuing central bank money is a natural monopoly, and therefore central banks were always based on public charters regulating them and giving them a unique role in a sovereign territorial entity. Many early central banks were not only based on a public charter but were also publicly owned and managed, and had well defined policy objectives. The book reviews these policy objectives and the financial operations of 25 central banks established before 1800. The book shows that many of the central bank controversies debated today actually date back to the period 1400-1800.

At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. American workers and farmers toiled long hours and often for wages that just exceeded subsistence, while the wealthiest Americans enjoyed conspicuous consumption and leisure. A century later, the economic conditions in America had changed beyond recognition. Improvements in agricultural productivity led to better nutrition and triggered improved productivity and living standards throughout the economy. American workers chose to take the benefits accruing from economic growth in the form of higher wages, shorter workweeks, better working conditions, and increased leisure. Americans spent larger proportions of their disposable incomes on leisure activities and recreational goods and services. Mass commercialized leisure became prevalent, with the rise of the motion picture, radio, and television industries. While many critics bemoaned the bland, homogenous nature (as they perceived it) of commercialized leisure, economists focused on the antitrust aspects of these industries. Much leisure activity depended upon the developing infrastructures of roads and electricity, while the government often set the rules of the economic game and provided leisure services and goods. The rise of leisure was an egalitarian triumph, as even poorer Americans enjoyed most of the available leisure opportunities. By 2000, leisure had become a dominant factor in the economy.

This book offers an interpretation of the Chinese monetary system, charting its evolution by examining key moments in history – from BCE 600 up to the present. It places these moments in international perspective by comparing primary sources in multiple languages and across three millennia. The book begins exploring the trajectory of Chinese currency at the birth of coinage around the world and ends with the implications of the current global financial crisis for China and the rest of the world. Its narrative highlights the way that Chinese money developed in relation to the currencies of other countries, paying special attention to the origins of paper money, the relationship between the West’s ascendancy and its mineral riches, the linkages between pre-modern finance, debasement, and then inflation with the emergence of nation-statehood. The book then looks ahead to the possible globalization of the RMB, the currency of the People’s Republic of China against the backdrop of growing global uncertainties as to America’s federal debt.

This book develops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban competition. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and fin ancial institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. The book traces the successive rise of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam as commercial cities between 1250 and 1650, showing how dominant cities feared being displaced by challengers while lesser ones sought to keep up by cultivating policies favorable to trade. It argues that it was this competitive urban network that promoted open access institutions in the Low Countries, and emphasizes the central role played by the urban magistrates in fostering these inclusive institutional arrangements. The book describes how the city fathers resisted the predatory or reckless actions of their territorial rulers, and how their nonrestrictive approach to commercial life succeeded in attracting merchants from all over Europe. It intervenes in an important debate on the growth of trade in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Challenging influential theories that attribute this commercial expansion to the political strength of merchants, the book demonstrates how urban competition fostered the creation of inclusive institutions in international trade.