Did macroconomic interventions make any contribution to Argentina's revovery from the Great Depression? Macroeconomic policy deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of convertibility in 1929. Fiscal policy was conservative. Monetary policy became unorthodox after 1931, when the Caja de conversión began rediscounting to sterilize gold outflows and avoid deflation. This change predated the creation of the central bank in 1935. A wider literature links the interwar depression in the core to flaws in the gold standard, and active monetary policy to escape from defaltion and slump; our work extends this idea to the periphery.

The orthodox view of U.S. reconversion after World War II relies on unacceptable GDP figures for the wartime economy and misinterprets the low level of unemployment during the war. For the postwar transtition, the emphasis on consumer demand financed by drawing down liquid assets accumulated during the war is inconsistent with the facts. The success of the transition depended on the reestablishement of “regime certainty,” which in turn depended on diminishing the influence of the more zealous New Dealers. Wartime and postwar political development created sufficient regime certainty for the postwar market system to generate genuine prosperity.

This study examines the interplay between financial crises, uncertainty, and economic growth during the interwar period. Comparing the experiences of ten countries, we provide evidence that reductions in the credibility of a country's commitment to the gold standard generated capital flight and higher interest rate volatility. This volatility, in turn, was inversely correlated with economic growth. These results suggest that financial crises helped propagate the Great Depression, in part, by increasing uncertainty.

This article uses 1937 and 1940 Census data to estimate the effect that hiring an additional relief worker in a county had on unemployment statistics for that county. The fundamental estimation problem arises because one cannot easily control for economic conditions that influenced both the number of individuals holding relief jobs and the number counted as jobless.

Research into sculture and entrepreneurship in Britain has been dominated by casual empiricism. This article shows the benefits of using a new method. Lifetime wealth accumulation is specified as a measure of entrepreneurial performance, and applied to data collected from dictionaries of business biography. Industry, region, and religious dissent are ruled out as explanations of entrepreneurial performance. Education and entrepreneurial type are the important predictors. Firm inheritors and those receiving a high-status education experienced relatively low lifetime rates of wealth accumulation. Firm founders, managers, and individuals with a lower-status education were comparatively successful.

The impact of the Great Depression was milder in the South Atlantic states, more severe in the Mountain states, and surprisingly uniform across other regions of the countly—despite large differences in industrial structere. Employing data on 20 manufacturing industries disaggregated by state, we analyze the relative contributions of industry mix and location to regional variations in economic performance. Industrial composition had a significant impact on employment growth, with regions that concentrated on durable goods or inputs to construction faring worse than others. Long-run trends also mattered, and explain much of the South Atlantic's more favorable performance.

I examine the change in prices of foreign sovereign dollar bonds over several weeks in 1930 that marked major legislative progress for the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. If the market was preoccupied by anticipated debt-repayment problems arising from the tariffs, this should be visible in the cross-countty pattern of bond prices. The bond price data are compared to indicators of country sensitivity to the tariffs and debt service. A significant relationship is found for bond price changes in June 1930, but the size of the effect is very small. Analysis at the regional and individual country level reveals some puzzling cases.

Scholars have long held strong views about the nature and extent of grain storage in early modern Europe. Direct evidence on the issue is quite poor and inconclusive.1 Randall Nielsen's ambitious attempt at solving the problem in a recent issue of this JOURNAL therefore deserves serious attention.2 Like others before him, Nielsen uses inferences from price behavior in assessing the nature of grain storage. Nielsen identifies three distinguishing implications of profit-maximizing storage for grain price structure.

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures “played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita” in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the phenomenon of economic growth. The interest was sparked by the introduction of new models by Paul Romer and Robert Lucas. The neoclassical Solow growth model, despite its influence over the years, has a fundamental flaw: growth is determined exogenously. The new models by Romer and Lucas solve for the growth rate of the economy endogenously. In these models, due to spillovers in capital or in human capital, growth can go on indefinitely. In a later work, Romer argued that increasing returns are necessary elements in models of technological innovations, which in turn form the foundation for endogenous growth models. The theoretical innovations in modeling growth stimulated a significant body of empirical work.

The downside of Chandler's success is that it has placed the large enterprise and the American economy on a pedestal, next to which eveiy other case appears a fumbling effort towards their apparent virtues. As some of the individual country studies in CAH show, well before even Chandler set out on this mission, American management consultants such as McKinsey were “exporting” the M-form company structure as their nostrum for all the world's business ills. As is shown in Fear's chapter and in several others, this involved a very simplistic diagnosis ofwhat those ills consisted of. The M-form conferred substantial advantages at a certain time and place in the evolution of industry, but it was no panacea. Furthermore, as I have suggested previously, its aetiology for comprehending its own prognoses was too shallow.