Dominated as it is by the powerful personality of Frederick W. Taylor, the history of scientific management thought has neglected important figures like Alexander Hamilton Church. Professor Jelinek shows that whereas Taylor's contribution was to move thinking down one “level of abstraction” to concrete shop operations, Church moved it up one level to construct a pattern of observations useful for management planning and evaluation.

Will the lack of hard data forever preclude firm conclusions about the impact of industrialization upon antebellum America? Whether it does or not, it seems unlikely to prevent continuation of one of the liveliest debates in American economic history. Professors Vedder and Gallaway contribute their findings to the controversy, and conclude that the rate of profit on manufacturing capital before 1860 was much lower than recent work has suggested.

As the end of the era of abundant natural petroleum oils approaches, the United States finds itself heavily committed to a way of life based on cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Whether such fuels will be available at any price in adequate quantities in the future, is the question today. Professor Vietor shows that it was also a serious question for some years after World War II, and that the United States carried a long way towards definitive demonstration a program for the development of high-volume synthetic liquid fuels production techniques. What that program accomplished; how the interests, public and private, who were responsible for the American fuel supply reacted to it; and why it was shelved for 25 years are among the points Vietor covers. The reader is left to weigh for himself the several reasons why this program was sidetracked, but he can hardly fail to conclude that where such fundamental matters as energy policy are concerned, American planning has been distressingly short range.

In recent issues of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, several papers ([7], [1], [4], and [6]) have presented simple sufficient conditions for detecting whether a given pattern of cash flows over time has a unique, simple, nonnegative internal rate of return. One such condition, developed independently by Bernhard [4] and deFaro [6], is easily shown to be the most general of the lot, i.e., to contain the others as special cases. See, e.g., deFaro[6].

Figures I through III on the following pages were omitted from the article, “New Perspectives on Informational Asymmetry and Agency Relationships,” by Robert A. Haugen and Lemma W. Senbet which appeared in the November 1979 issue of this journal.

The existence of default risk is an important characteristic of most lending operations, and many of the studies dealing with lending behavior incorporate default risk considerations. Two basic approaches to the modeling of such behavior can be identified according to their treatment of default probabilities: the first approach assumes that the likelihood of default is independent of the actions of the lender under consideration, namely, the volume of the loan granted by the current lender has no impact on the default probability (e.g., the works by Yawitz [9], Feder and Just [3], and Bierman and Hass [2]). Such an assumption may be quite appropriate in situations where the volume of operations of a single lender is rather small relative to the size of borrower's assets (or previous debt), as is the case with most bond buyers or with banks who lend to sovereign borrowers.