Lee A. Craig, North Carolina State University Introduction Although employer-provided retirement plans are a relatively recent phenomenon in the private sector, dating from the late nineteenth century, public sector plans go back much further in history. From the Roman Empire to the rise of the early-modern nation state, rulers and legislatures have provided pensions for […]
Douglas Puffert, University of Warwick Path dependence is the dependence of economic outcomes on the path of previous outcomes, rather than simply on current conditions. In a path dependent process, “history matters” — it has an enduring influence. Choices made on the basis of transitory conditions can persist long after those conditions change. Thus, explanations […]
B. Zorina Khan, Bowdoin College Introduction Such scholars as Max Weber and Douglass North have suggested that intellectual property systems had an important impact on the course of economic development. However, questions from other eras are still current today, ranging from whether patents and copyrights constitute optimal policies toward intellectual inventions and their philosophical rationale […]
Jon Moen, University of Mississippi The Panic of 1907 was the last and most severe of the bank panics that plagued the National Banking Era of the United States. Severe panics also happened in 1873, 1884, 1890, and 1893, although numerous other smaller financial crises cropped up from time to time. Bank panics were characterized […]
Siddharth Chandra, University of Pittsburgh The history of opium has attracted the attention of historians for decades, and in a way that the history of few other commodities has. Because a lot has already been written on the opium trade in various parts of the world (for a sampling, see the citations at the end […]
Barbara Alexander, Charles River Associates This article outlines the history of the National Recovery Administration, one of the most important and controversial agencies in Roosevelt’s New Deal. It discusses the agency’s “codes of fair competition” under which antitrust law exemptions could be granted in exchange for adoption of minimum wages, problems some industries encountered in […]
Ola Honningdal Grytten, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration Overview Norway, with its population of 4.6 million on the northern flank of Europe, is today one of the most wealthy nations in the world, both measured as GDP per capita and in capital stock. On the United Nation Human Development Index, Norway has been […]
John Singleton, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Living standards in New Zealand were among the highest in the world between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s. But New Zealand’s economic growth was very sluggish between 1950 and the early 1990s, and most Western European countries, as well as several in East Asia, overtook […]
William M. Boal, Drake University and Michael R. Ransom, Brigham Young University What is Labor Monopsony? The term “monopsony,” first used in print by Joan Robinson (1969, p. 215), means a single buyer in a market. Like a monopolist (a single seller), a monopsonist has power over price through control of quantity. In particular, a […]
Ron Michener, University of Virginia “There certainly can’t be a greater Grievance to a Traveller, from one Colony to another, than the different values their Paper Money bears.” An English visitor, circa 1742 (Kimber, 1998, p. 52). The monetary arrangements in use in America before the Revolution were extremely varied. Each colony had its own […]
ECONOMICS HISTORY ASSOCIATION
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
MICHAEL HAUPERT
EMAIL: MHAUPERT@UWLAX.EDU
MEETINGS COORDINATOR
JEREMY LAND
JEREMY.LAND@GU.SE
ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR
TAYLOR LAND
TAYLORLAND@EH.NET