AMERICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY
Economics 541
Spring 2007
Professor Hugh Rockoff
Department of Economics
New Jersey Hall
732-932-77857
WWW.fas-econ.rutgers.edu/home/rockoff
Hours:
Tuesday 3-5, Friday 3-5, or by appointment
Last Updated:
Purpose. This course surveys the economic history of the
Textbook. I do not require that you read a textbook, but I recommend that you buy a copy of Hugh Rockoff and Gary Walton, History of the American Economy to provide more background.
Weekly Assignments, Examinations,
and the Research Paper.
Weekly Assignments: Each week, on Friday, you will deliver to me a one page double-spaced summary of the key points in the assigned readings in narrative form -- not an outline. They are due in class or by email and are worth 10 percent of your grade. They will not be marked for quality, but for each one you miss, you will lose 1 percent. The object is to get you to think quickly and concisely about what you have read. The first assignment is actually a graphing exercise.
Examinations. There will be two exams each worth 25 percent of your grade. They will consist of essay questions about the major topics we cover. The tests will not be cumulative.
Research
Paper. Approximately 40 percent
of your grade will be based on a research paper of approximately 30 pages
(including graphs, tables, and references) due on Monday, April 30 at
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Semester at a glance |
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Class, Date |
Topic |
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1. Tuesday, January 16 |
Phases of American Economic History |
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2. Friday, January 19 |
Salient features of American Economic History |
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First assignment: graph
variables |
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3. Tuesday, January 23 |
The Old Regime and the New (1) |
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4. Friday, January 26 |
No Class |
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Second assignment: summarize
Calomiris |
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5. Tuesday, January 30 |
The Old Regime and the New (2); Abstract for paper due. |
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6. Friday, February 2 |
Financial History, 1791-1830 (1) |
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Third assignment: Summarize Grubb |
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7. Tuesday, February 6 |
Financial History, 1831-1860 (2) |
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8. Friday, February 9 |
Economics of American Slavery (1) |
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Fourth assignment: Summarize Fogel and Engerman |
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9. Tuesday, February 13 |
Economics of American Slavery (2) |
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10. Friday, February 16 |
The Economic Impact of the Civil War |
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Fifth assignment: Willard, Kristen L., Timothy W. Guinnane, and
Harvey S. Rosen |
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11. Tuesday, February 20 |
The South After the Civil War (Sharecropping) |
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12. Friday, February 23 |
No Class |
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Sixth assignment: Ransom, Roger L. and Richard
Sutch. “Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War.” The Journal of Economic History >
Vol. 32, No. 3 (Sep., 1972), pp. 641-669. (JSTOR) |
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13. Tuesday, February 27 |
Integration of Domestic Markets in the Postbellum Era |
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14. Friday, March 2 |
Transcontinental RRs (Land Grants). |
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Seventh assignment: (1) James, John A. “The Development of the National Money Market, 1893-1911.” The Journal of Economic History > Vol. 36, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 878-897. (JSTOR) (2) Progress report on Term Paper due. |
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15. Tuesday, March 6 |
Transcontinental RRs (Social Savings) |
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16. Friday, March 9 |
First Exam |
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Eighth assignment: Prepare for Midterm Exam |
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March 12-March 16 |
Spring Break – work on papers |
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17. Tuesday, March 20 |
The United States and the Gold Standard |
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18. Friday, March 23 |
Banking Panics and the Founding of the Federal Reserve System |
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Ninth assignment: Jeffrey Miron, “Financial Panics, the Seasonality of the Nominal Interest Rate and the Founding of the Fed,” American Economic Review (March 1986). (JSTOR) |
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19. Tuesday, March 27 |
World War I (Mobilization) |
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20. Friday, March 30 |
World War I (Legacies) |
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Tenth assignment: Hugh Rockoff,
“Until it’s over, over there: the U.S. Economy in World War I,” in Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, The
Economics of World War I ( |
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21. Tuesday, April 3 |
The Roaring Twenties |
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22. Friday, April 6 |
The Great Depression (One Darned Thing after Another) |
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Eleventh assignment: Friedman, Milton and Anna J. Schwartz. A
Monetary History of the |
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23. Tuesday, April 10 |
What Caused the Great Depression? |
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24. Friday, April 13 |
World War II (The Military Front) |
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Twelfth assignment: Friedman, |
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25. Tuesday, April 17 |
No Class – Rained Out |
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26. Friday, April 20 |
The Evolution of the Labor Market |
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Thirteenth assignment: Carolyn Moehling will lecture on the evolution
of the labor market on April 20. The assignment will be to read and find the
fatal flaw in: *Donohue, John J., III, and James Heckman.
"Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on
the Economic Status of Blacks." Journal of Economic Literature
(December, 1991): 1603-43. |
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27.Tuesday, April 24 |
International Convergence |
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28. Friday, April 27 |
Final Exam |
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Fourteenth assignment: Write your term paper! |
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Readings
The readings for each week are divided into
starred readings and supplementary readings. You must read and summarize the
starred readings. The supplementary readings are intended for students who wish
to pursue a topic in greater depth, especially for students whose research
paper will be related to that topic.
Many of the starred readings are available at
JSTOR or other sites. I will make available copies of the other starred
readings.
1. January 16
Scope and Methodology of
Economic History
(You do not need to summarize the starred readings for this class)
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 1.
*Claudia Goldin, “Cliometrics and the Nobel,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (Spring 1995), pp. 191-208.
*McCloskey, Donald N. (1976) "Does the Past
Have Useful Economics." Journal of Economic Literature 14: 434-61.
Rockoff, Hugh. "History and Economics."
in Engaging the Past, Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994), 48-76.
David, Paul A. "Clio and the Economics of
QWERTY." American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 75
(1985): 332-337.
Fogel, Robert W. "The Specification Problem
in Economic History." Journal of Economic History (September 1967):
283-308.
North, Douglass C. "Structure and
Performance: The Task of Economic History." Journal of Economic Literature 16 (1978):
963-78.
Redlich, Fritz. "'New' and Traditional
Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdependence." Journal of
Economic History
25 (December, 1965): 480-95.
2. Friday, January 19
Salient features of American Economic Growth
(You do not need to summarize the starred readings for this class,
however you do need to do the exercise with two stars)
**Graph annual growth rates for population, the price level, real GDP, and real GDP per capita from 1790 to 2004. Produce an excel graph for each series. Identify the key periods. Think about how to present the material! Name one potential problem (for example an index number problem) with each series.
One source for these series is http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/
Note: www.eh.net is a very useful website for economic history, data and other important questions. Go explore it.
You can also use the series from Historical Statistics of the United States: Millenial Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). It can be accessed through the Rutgers library site. This source is essential and should be the site that you normally rely on for annual time series.
*Paul M. Romer, “Why, Indeed, in America? Theory, History and the Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” American Economic Review (May 1996), pp. 202-206. (JSTOR)
*Wright, Gavin. The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879-1940,” American Economic Review. Vol. 80 (4). p 651-68. September 1990. (JSTOR)
Gordon, Robert J., “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Autumn 2000), pp. 49-74. (NBER Working Paper 7833, August 2000).
B. Zorina Khan, “Property Rights and Patent Litigation in Early Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Economic History 55 (March 1995), pp. 58-97.
Robert E. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Stanley Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, (2000) Vol II, pp. 1-56.
Moses Abramovitz and Paul A. David, “Growth in the Era of Knowledge-Based Progress,” in Stanley Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, (2000) Vol III, pp. 1-98.
Robert J. Gordon, “Interpreting the One Big Wave in U.S. Productivity Growth,” in Bart van Ark, et. al. Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth (Kluwer, 2000). Or http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/338.pdf or (NBER Working Paper 7752, June 2000).
Nicholas F.R. Crafts, “The First Industrial Revolution: A Guided Tour for Growth Economists,” American Economic Review (May 1996), pp. 197-207.
Stephen N. Broadberry, “Comparative productivity in British and American manufacturing during the nineteenth century, Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994), pp. 21-48.
Stephen Broadberry, “How did the United States and Germany overtake Britain? A Sectoral analysis of comparative productivity levels, 1870-1990,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998), pp. 375-407.
Richard Nelson and Gavin Wright,
“The Rise and Fall of American Technological
Leadership: The Postwar Era in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Literature. Vol. 30 (4). p
1931-64. (December 1992).
3. Tuesday, January 23
The Old Regime and the New (1)
*Charles A. Calomiris, “Institutional Failure Monetary Scarcity and the Depreciation of the Continental,” Journal of Economic History (1988), pp. 47-68. (JSTOR)
Harper, Lawrence. “The Effects of the Navigation Acts on the Thirteen Colonies.” In The Era of the American Revolution, ed. Richard Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).
This is the classic study of the effects of British Mercantilism. The Cliometricians have also explored the issue.
McClelland, Peter D. “The Cost to America of British Imperial Policy.” The American Economic Review > Vol. 59, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-first Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1969), pp. 370-381
Reid, Joseph D. Jr.”Economic Burden: Spark to the American Revolution?” The Journal of Economic History > Vol. 38, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History (Mar., 1978), pp. 81-100.
Reid, Joseph D. On Navigating the Navigation Acts with Peter D. McClelland: “Comment.” Joseph D. Reid, Jr. The American Economic Review > Vol. 60, No. 5 (Dec., 1970), pp. 949-955.
McClelland, Peter D. “On Navigating the Navigation Acts with Peter McClelland: Reply.” The American Economic Review > Vol. 60, No. 5 (Dec., 1970), pp. 956-958.
4.Friday, January 26 (No Class)
5.Tuesday, January 30
The Old Regime and the New (2)
(Abstract of Paper due)
*Farley Grubb, “Creating the U.S. Dollar Currency union, 1748-1811: A Quest for Monetary Stability or a Usurpation of State Sovereignty for Personal Gain,” American Economic Review (December 2003), p. 1778-1797. (JSTOR)
Hugh Rockoff, “How Long did it take the United States to Become an Optimal Currency Area?” NBER Historical Paper 124,(2000).
Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
This is a classic study. It argued that economic motives explain the Constitution.
Robert A. McGuire and Robert L. Ohsfeldt, “An Economic Model of Voting Behavior over Specific Issues at the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” Journal of Economic History (1986), pp. 79-112.
Cathy Matson, “The Revolution, the Constitution and the New Nation,” in R. Gallman and S. Engerman, eds. Cambridge Economic History of the United States Vol I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 363-401.
6. Friday, February 2.
Financial History,
1791-1830 (1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 12.
*Temin, Peter. "The Economic Consequences of the Bank War."
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Mar., 1968), pp.
257-274.(JSTOR).
*Temin, Peter. "The Anglo-American Business Cycle, 1820-60."
The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 1974), pp.
207-221. (JSTOR)
Temin, Peter. The Jacksonian
Economy, New York: Norton, 1969.
7. Tuesday, February 6
Financial History,
1791-1830 (2)
Rockoff, Hugh. "The Free Banking Era: A Re‑Examination,"
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, May 1974, pp. 141‑173.
Rockoff, Hugh."New Evidence on Free Banking
in the United States," American Economic Review 76 (September
1986): 886‑889.
*Rolnick, Arthur J., and Warren E. Weber.
"New Evidence on the Free Banking Era." American Economic Review
73 (1983): 1080-1091. (JSTOR)
Engerman, Stanley. "A Note on the Economic
Consequences of the Second Bank of the United States," Journal of
Political Economy 78 (July/August 1970): 72528.
Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America
from the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1957, passim.
Kahn, James A. "Another Look at Free Banking
in the United States." American Economic Review 75 (1985): 881-885.
Macesich, George. "Sources of Monetary
Disturbances in the U.S., 1834-1845." The Journal of Economic History
20 (1960): 407-34.
Redlich, Fritz. The Molding of American
Banking: Men and Ideas. New York: Hafner, 1947 and 1951, 2 vols.
Rolnick, Arthur J. and Warren E. Weber. "The
Causes of Free Bank Failures: A Detailed Examination of the Evidence." Journal
of Monetary Economics 14 (1984): 267‑91.
Cormac O’Grada and Eugene N. White, “The Panics of 1854 and 1857: A View from the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank,” Journal of Economic History 63 (March 2003), pp. 213-240.
8. Friday, February 9
Economics of American Slavery (1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 13.
Fogel, Robert W. and Stanley L. Engerman. Time
on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Two Volumes.
*Fogel, Robert W. and
Steckel, Richard H. "A Peculiar Population:
The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to
Maturity." Journal of Economic History 46 (1986): 721-42.
Conrad, Alfred H. and John R. Meyer (1958)
"The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South" Journal of
Political Economy 66: 95-130. Reprinted in their book The Economics of
Slavery and Other Studies in Econometric History,
Fogel, Robert W. Without Consent or Contract:
The Rise and Fall of American Slavery.
9. Tuesday, February 13
Economics of American Slavery (2)
A number of papers attacked the evidence offered by
Fogel and Engerman to show that slave agriculture was more efficient than free
agriculture. These include the following.
*Fogel, Robert W. and
Wright, Gavin "The Efficiency of Slavery:
Another Interpretation." American Economic Review 69 (1979):
219-26. (JSTOR)
David, Paul A. and Peter Temin. (1979) "Explaining
the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South: A
Comment." American Economic Review 69: 213-218.
Field, Elizabeth B. (1988) "The Relative
Efficiency of Slavery Revisited: A Translog Production Function
Approach." American Economic
Review 78: 543-549.
Schaefer, Donald and Mark D. Schmitz. "The
Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture: A Comment." American Economic
Review 69 (1979): 208-212.
10. Friday, February 16
The Economic Impact of
the Civil War
*Willard, Kristen L., Timothy W. Guinnane, and
Harvey S. Rosen. “Turning Points in the Civil War: Views from the Greenback
Market.” The American Economic Review,
Vol. 86, No. 4 (Sep., 1996), pp. 1001-1018. (JSTOR)
Smith, Gregor W. and R. Todd Smith.
“Greenback-Gold Returns and Expectations of Resumption, 1862-1879.” The Journal of Economic History, Vol.
57, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 697-717.
Engerman, Stanley. "The Economic Impact of
the Civil War." In The Reinterpretation of American Economic History,
Robert Fogel and
Goldin, Claudia, and Frank Lewis. "The
Economic Cost of the American Civil War." Journal of Economic History
35 (1975): 294-326.(JSTOR)
Temin, Peter. "The Post-Bellum Recovery of
the South and the Cost of the Civil War." Journal of Economic History
36 (1976): 898-907.
11. Tuesday, February 20
Southern Agriculture
After the Civil War (1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 14.
*Ransom, Roger L. and Richard Sutch.
“Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War.” The Journal of Economic History > Vol. 32, No. 3 (Sep., 1972),
pp. 641-669. (JSTOR)
Ransom, Roger. L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind
of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation.
Alston, Lee, and Robert Higgs. "Contractual
Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and
Tests." Journal of Economic History 42 (1982): 327-53.
DeCanio, Stephen. Agriculture in the
Postbellum South.
12. Friday, February 23
Southern Agriculture
After the Civil War (2)
A number of important papers on the Ransom-Sutch thesis were published in a special issue of Explorations in Economic History, including the following three.
Ransom, Roger. L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: Reconsidered (and Turbo Charged) Explorations in Economic History. Vol. 38 (1). p 6-39. January 2001.
Wright, Gavin. “Comment: Reflections on One Kind of Freedom and the Southern Economy,” 40-47.
Engerman, Stanley. “Comment: One Kind of Freedom, A Comparative Perspective,” 64-67.
Fishback, Price V. "Debt Peonage in
Postbellum
Higgs, Robert. Competition and Coercion: Blacks
in the American Economy, 18651914.
Margo, Robert A. "Accumulation of Property
by Southern Blacks Before World War One: Comment and Further Evidence." American
Economic Review 74 (September 1984): 768-76.
Margo, Robert A. Race and Schooling in the
South, 1880-1950.
Reid, Joseph. "Sharecropping as an
Understandable Market Response: The Postbellum South." Journal of
Economic History 33 (1973): 10630.
Ransom, Roger L. Conflict and Compromise: The
Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War.
Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South:
Revolutions in the Southern Economy.
13. Tuesday, February 27
Integration of Domestic
Markets
One of the basic ideas of economics is that prices of the same good sold in different markets will tend to converge. Economic historians frequently test this theory and use it to analyze economic growth. We will focus on the integration of capital markets, but one could also focus on labor markets, commodity markets, etc.
Davis, Lance. "The Investment Market,
1870-1914: Evolution of a National Market." Journal of Economic History
25 (September 1965): 355-99. (JSTOR)
Sylla, Richard. “Federal Policy, Banking Market
Structure, and Capital Mobilization in the
*James, John A. “The Development of the National
Money Market, 1893-1911.” The Journal of
Economic History > Vol. 36, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 878-897. (JSTOR)
Kris James Michener and Ian W. McLean, “
Joshua Rosenbloom, “Was There a National Labor Market at the end of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 56 (September 1996), pp. 626-656.
Jeffrey Williamson, “Globalization, Convergence and History,” Journal of Economic History (1996), pp. 1-30.
Jeffrey Williamson, “Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1998), pp. 51-72.
14. Friday, March 2.
Railroads and American Economic Growth (1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of the American
Economy, chapters 9, 16.
*Fogel, Robert W. “A Quantitative Approach to the
Study of Railroads in American Economic Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary
Findings.” The Journal of Economic
History > Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1962), pp. 163-197.
Fogel, Robert W., Railroads and American
Economic Growth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), pp.
1-146.
Coatsworth, John H. "Indispensable Railroads
in a Backward Economy: The Case of
David, Paul. "Transport Innovations and
Economic Growth: Professor Fogel On and Off the Rails." In Paul David
(ed.), Technical Choice, Innovation, and Economic Growth (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), chapter 6.
Engerman, Stanley L. "Some Issues Relating
to Railroad Subsidies and the Evaluation of Land Grants." Journal of
Economic History 32 (June 1972): 443-63.
Fishlow, Albert. American Railroads and the Transformation
of the Antebellum Economy.
W.W. Rostow. The Stages of Economic Growth: A
Non-Communist Manifesto.
15. Tuesday, March 6
Railroads and American Economic Growth (2)
*Lebergott, Stanley. "
*Fogel, Robert W. "Notes on the Social
Saving Controversy." Journal Of Economic History 39 (March 1979):
1-54.
16. Friday, March 9
First Exam
March 12-March 16
Spring Break – work on papers
17. Tuesday, March 20
.
The
*Friedman, Milton and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the
Bordo, Michael and Hugh Rockoff. "The Gold
Standard as a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." The Journal of Economic History, Vol.
56, No. 2, Papers Presented at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic
History Association (Jun., 1996), pp. 389-428. (JSTOR).
Hugh Rockoff, “The Wizard of Oz,” Journal of Political Economy (JSTOR).
18. Friday, March 23
Banking Panics and the Founding of
the Federal Reserve
Kerry Odell and Marc Weidenmier, “Real Shock, Monetary
Aftershock: The 1906
**Jeffrey Miron, “Financial Panics, the Seasonality of the Nominal Interest Rate and the Founding of the Fed,” American Economic Review (March 1986). (JSTOR)
Charles W. Calomiris and Gary Gorton, “The origins of
banking panics: Models, facts and bank regulation,” in R. Glenn Hubbard, ed., Financial
Markets and Financial Crises
Elmus Wicker Banking Panics of the Gilded Age (
Jon Moen and Ellis W. Tallman, “The Bank Panic of 1907: The Role of Trust Companies,” Journal of Economic History 52 (September 1992), pp. 611-630.
Jon Moen and Ellis Tallman, “Clearinghouse Membership and Deposit Contraction during the Panic of 1907,” Journal of Economic History 60 (March 2000), pp. 145-163.
19. Tuesday, March 27
World War I (1)
**Hugh Rockoff, “Until it’s over,
over there: the U.S. Economy in World War I,”
in Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, The Economics of World War I
(
Rockoff, Hugh. Drastic Measures: A History of
Wage and Price Controls in the
Press, chapter 3.
Clark, John Maurice. "The Basis of War-Time
Collectivism." American Economic Review 7 (1917): 772-790.
Clark, John Maurice. The Costs of the War to
the American People.
20. Friday, March 30
World War I (2)
*Clark, John Maurice. "The Basis of War-Time
Collectivism." American Economic Review 7 (1917): 772-790.
Clark, John Maurice. The Costs of the War to
the American People.
21. Tuesday, April 3
The Roaring Twenties
Eugene N. White, “The Stock Market Boom and Crash of 1929 Revisited,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 1990), pp. 76-83.
*Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White, “Was the Crash of 1929 Expected?” American Economic Review (March 1994), pp. 271-81. (JSTOR).
Libecap, Gary D. "The Political Allocation
of Mineral Rights: A Reevaluation of
22. Friday, April 6
The Great Depression (1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of the American
Economy, chapter 23, 24.
**Friedman, Milton and Anna J. Schwartz. A
Monetary History of the
Temin, Peter. Did Monetary Forces Cause the
Great Depression?
Bernanke, Benjamin. "Non Monetary Effects of
the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression." American
Economic Review 73 (1983): 257-276.
Bordo, Michael D. (1989) "The Contribution
of A Monetary History of the
Bordo, Michael D. and Andrew Filardo, NBER
Working Paper No. 10833. Issued in October 2004. (Available at www.nber.org).
Romer, Christina. "The Great Crash and the
Onset of the Great Depression." Quarterly Journal of Economics CV
(1990): 597-624.
Schwartz, Anna J. "Understanding
1929-33." In Karl Brunner (ed.) The Great Depression Revisited.
Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great
Depression
White, Eugene N. "A Reinterpretation of the
Banking Crisis of 1930." Journal of Economic History 44 (1984):
119-138.
23. Tuesday, April 10
The Great Depression (2)
*Friedman, Milton and Anna J. Schwartz. A
Monetary History of the
24. Friday, April 13
World War II
(1)
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 25.
**Friedman,
Evans, Paul. "The Effects of General Price
Controls in the
Gordon, Robert J. "45 Billion of U.S.
Private Investment has been Mislaid." American Economic Review 59 (June
1969): 221-38.
Higgs, Robert. "Private Profit, Public Risk:
Institutional Antecedents of the Modern Military Procurement System in the
Rearmament Program 1940-1941." In Geofrey Mills and Hugh Rockoff, eds., The
Sinews of War: Essays on the Economic History of World War II
Rockoff, Hugh. "The Response of the Giant
Corporations to Wage and Price Controls in World War II." Journal of
Economic History 41 (March 1981): 123-8.
25. Tuesday, April 17
World War II (2)
Rockoff, Hugh. Drastic Measures: A History of
Wage and Price Controls in the
Galbraith, John Kenneth. A Theory of Price
Control.
26. Friday, April 20
The Evolution of the Labor Market
in the Postwar era
Walton and Rockoff, History of
the American Economy, chapter 30.
*Donohue, John J., III, and James Heckman.
"Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on
the Economic Status of Blacks." Journal of Economic Literature
(December, 1991): 1603-43.
Goldin, Claudia. "The Political Economy of
Immigration Restriction in the
Goldin, Claudia D. "The Role of World War II
in the Rise of Women's Employment." American Economic Review 81
(1991): 741-56.
Goldin, Claudia. (1988) "Maximum Hours
Legislation and Female Employment: A Reassessment" Journal of Political
Economy 97: 535-560.
Goldin, Claudia. (1990) Understanding the
Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women.
Goldin, Claudia, and Robert A. Margo. (1992)
"The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the
Wright, Gavin. "Cheap Labor and Southern
Textiles." Quarterly Journal of Economics 96 (1981) : 605-630.
27. Tuesday, April 24
International Convergence
*Abramovitz, Moses. "Catching Up, Forging
Ahead, and Falling Behind." Journal of Economic History XLVI (June
1986): 385-406.
Baulmol, William J. "Productivity, Growth,
Convergence, and Welfare: What do the Long-run Data Show." 78 American
Economic Review (December 1986): 1072-1085.
De Long, J. Bradford. "Productivity Growth,
Convergence, and Welfare: Comment." 76 American Economic Review
(December 1988): 1138-1159.
Easterlin, Richard A. "Does Economic Growth
Improve the Human
Gershenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical
Perspective
Lebergott, Stanley. The American Economy:
Income, Wealth and Want.
Web Sites
The Department of Economics maintains a
comprehensive web site at http://economics.rutgers.edu.
This should be your first stop for all your
economics inquiries. On the web site you
will find information about the faculty, library resources, and internet
resources in economics. In particular, try exploring "Other Related
Links" for discussion about what economists do, economics resources at
For economic historians the most important site
is the "cliometrics" web site: http://www.eh.net. The
How to find a topic for your paper.
Finding a good topic for your paper will probably
be the hardest thing you have to do in the course. Finding topics is also one
of the most important skills you will need to develop as a professional
economist. You will need to find a topic for your dissertation, and especially
if you work in academia, you will need to find topics for research papers.
I do not expect a publishable paper or a Ph.D.
dissertation. But the process of finding topics is much the same whatever the
goal.
The search for a topic can follow many different
paths. Often it begins with a policy question. How did things really work under
the classical gold standard?" What happened to real wages when immigration
was so rapid at the turn of the century? In any case, one typically (although
not always) begins by reading the frontier literature in the field. But at some
point one has to find a way to add to what is already known.
With this in mind let us consider some of the
ways that economic historians add to our store of knowledge.
(1) Explaining an "anomaly" in an
existing study. In a famous study of hyperinflation Phillip Cagan showed
that a monetarist model emphasizing the rate of inflation explained the data
fairly well. But a number of points toward the end of the hyperinflations were
"outliers." A number of papers have been written to explain these
points, as the result for example, of anticipated monetary reforms.
Of course, it would be better (for your grade,
for your career, and for the future of civilization) to come up with an entirely
new theory that explains hyperinflation better than the monetary theory:
Inflation rates are determined by the level of profit-dissonance, which can be
measured by the coefficient of variation of profit rates. When the random walk
in profit dissonance carries it above 2.05, hyperinflation results. This sort
of thing is what Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
called a paradigm shift. But normal research doesn't work this way. Most of us
are destined to be the economists who gradually extend and refine Cagan's
model.
(2) Extending an existing study backwards or
forwards in time. Howard Bodenhorn (a successful Rutgers Ph.D from a few
years past) and I did a paper in which we extended Lance Davis's study of
regional interest rates, which covered the period from the Civil War to the
turn of the century, to the pre-civil war period. We had a reason for doing so:
we suspected that the Civil War had significantly disrupted the capital market.
And it wasn't easy to find the data. If it had been, Lance Davis and many
others who have studied the postbellum period, would have extended the data
backwards themselves. But it was worth doing, we found considerable evidence of
capital market integration in the antebellum period.
(3) Repeating a study with data from a
different country. When asked why he was touring
(4) Repeating a study done for one particular
market with data from another market. For example, Robert Fogel, a winner
of the Nobel prize in economics, estimated the "social savings"
created by
(5) Repeating a study done for one government
regulation for another regulation. Recently, Charles Calomiris and Eugene
White studied the political economy of the adoption of Deposit Insurance in the
1930s. There choice was motivated by current policy considerations. But I would
guess that almost any piece of federal legislation would repay careful study.
At the very least a reading of the Congressional Record and of the
Congressional hearings would reveal which economic interest groups promoted and
opposed a particular piece of legislation.
(6) Discovering a body of unexploited data.
Frequently, the order of things is reversed -- a researcher finds the data and then
looks for interesting questions the data can answer. Recently, Lance Davis and
Robert Gallman completed a massive study of the U.S. whaling industry in the
nineteenth century. This project has yielded a large number of research papers
and has drawn considerable attention. It began when Gallman stumbled on the
remarkably complete records of the American whaling industry while searching
for something else in the library. (Considerable detail is available on every
whale caught by an American vessel including length, weight, oil content,
marital status, and previous arrest record.)
As an experiment I tried opening the Historical
Statistics of the United States, the most important compendium of
historical data, randomly. I landed on page 690 which gives annual data on
cigar and cigarette production from 1870 to 1970. It naturally brought to mind
certain questions -- Is price data available in the primary sources cited in
the Historical Statistics?; did cigarette consumption rise at the
expense of cigar consumption, or did total consumption of tobacco products
increase?; when have there been changes in the federal tax on cigarettes?; can
Gary Becker's theory of rational addiction be tested with this data; etc. etc.
And, of course, the sobering thought that if the data is this good, someone has
probably already done the study.
(7) Reexamining older studies using new
statistical or theoretical models. Econometrics is constantly changing,
some would say progressing. Often new statistical techniques can show that conclusions
drawn previously by using more primitive techniques are in error. New theories
can also provide a basis for reexamining old data. Cagan's study of
hyperinflations is again a good example. As new theories were developed in
macroeconomics, such as rational expectations, they were tested on Cagan's
data.
(8) Following up published suggestions for
future research. Many books and journal articles contain suggestions for
future research. These are sometimes worth considering. Naturally, you have to
ask yourself why the author is willing to share a valuable idea with strangers.
But there are circumstances when it appears that useful suggestions have been
made.
(9) Reexamining one of the "myths"
of economics. The classic example in this genre is Ronald Coase, "The
Lighthouse in Economics," Journal of Law and Economics, 1974,
357-76. Economic theorists since John Stuart Mill have used the lighthouse as
an example of a public good: a valuable service, but one the private sector
would not produce since there is no way to charge the ships that benefit from
the lighthouse. Coase examined the actual history of lighthouse finance, and
showed that the true story is far more complicated.
(10) Surveying the literature on a particular
question. This is usually what students think of as research, and I would
like you to stay away from survey articles if you can. I would prefer that you
get some empirical data and try to analyze it. Most survey articles don't add
to knowledge. But some do, by generalizing from various studies, or by
developing a framework that brings various pieces of work together. So I don't
want to make a blanket statement that survey articles are unacceptable, but you
will have to persuade me that your survey will add to knowledge, and won't simply
be a summary of what other people have said.
(11) Asking someone for a topic. Its
perfectly acceptable to ask people to suggest a topic.
You can ask me. I have a list of topics you can choose from, although I would like
you to at least make an effort to find a topic on your own. I can also help you
turn a general question or interest into a paper topic.
You can ask one of the other professors in the
Department. Of course, you need
to be polite. Make an appointment, realize that the professor is mostly
interested in his or her own research. Perhaps you can help the professor by
exploring an aspect of a question in which they are interested.