Changes in formal institutions do not always affect economic outcomes. When an industry has specific technological features that limit a government's ability to expropriate it, or when the industry is able to call on foreign governments to enforce its de facto property rights, economic agents can easily mitigate changes in formal institutions designed to reduce these property rights. We explore the Mexican oil industry from 1911 to 1929 and demonstrate that informal rather than formal institutions were key, permitting oil companies to coordinate their responses to increases in taxes or the redefinition of their de jure property rights.

In 1842 Lowell textile firms increased weaving productivity by assigning three looms per worker instead of two. This marked a turning point. Before, weavers at Lowell were temporary and mostly literate Yankee farm girls; afterwards, firms increasingly hired local residents, including illiterate and Irish workers. An important factor was on-the-job learning. Literate workers learned new technology faster, but local workers stayed longer. These changes were unprofitable before 1842, and the advantages of literacy declined over time. Firm policy and social institutions slowly changed to permit deeper human-capital investment and more productive implementation of technology.

In May 1927, the German central bank intervened indirectly to reduce lending to equity investors. The crash that followed ended the only stock market boom during Germany's relative stabilization 1924–1928. The evidence strongly suggests that the German central bank under Hjalmar Schacht was wrong to be concerned about stock prices—there was no bubble. Also, the Reichsbank was mistaken in its belief that a fall in the market would reduce the importance of short-term foreign borrowing and improve conditions in the money market. The misguided intervention had important real effects. Investment suffered, helping to tip Germany into depression.

During World War II the United States attempted to prevent Germany from acquiring wolfram (tungsten ore) in Spain by buying it in the open market. Preemptive buying forced the Germans to pay more for and to consume less tungsten, a material crucial for the production of machine tools and armor-piercing shells. The income provided an important incentive for Spain to remain neutral. The naval blockade and the relatively low elasticity of the supply of wolfram contributed to the success of the wolfram-buying campaign.

Takahashi Korekiyo is remembered as a wise finance minister saving Japan from the Great Depression. The contribution of his policy measures however remains to be rigorously measured, with proper control of other forces also driving the recovery. Structural vector autoregression analysis of previously unexploited monthly data confirms the pivotal role of Takahashi's debt-financed fiscal expansion. Monetizing the public debts, the Bank of Japan maintained a neutral stance. The recovery was aided by exchange-rate shocks generated during the transition from the gold standard to the floating-exchange-rate regime and, to a smaller extent, by the world recovery.

The effects of the G.I. Bill on collegiate attainment may have differed for black and white Americans owing to differential returns to education and differences in opportunities at colleges and universities, with men in the South facing explicitly segregated colleges. The empirical evidence suggests that World War II and the availability of G.I. benefits had a substantial and positive impact on the educational attainment of white men and black men born outside the South. However, for those black veterans likely to be limited to the South in their educational choices, the G.I. Bill had little effect on collegiate outcomes.

The behavior of principals and agents in the interwar Soviet economy can be studied through the failed attempt to develop a new aviation-engine technology based on the steam turbine. Some possible approaches to the evaluation of R&D failure are outlined. Soviet R&D agents competed for funding within a command system. Principals funded ventures in a context of biased information and adverse selection. In the presence of sunk costs budget constraints on individual projects were often loose, but were tightened periodically. There is evidence of rent seeking, but not that rents were distributed deliberately as political gifts to loyal agents.

Using records of individual depositors' accounts, this article provides a detailed microeconomic analysis of two banking panics. The panics of 1854 and 1857 were not characterized by an immediate mass panic of depositors and had important time dimensions. We examine depositor behavior using a hazard model. Contagion was the key factor in 1854 but it created only a local panic. The 1857 panic began with runs by businessmen and banking sophisticates followed by less informed depositors. Evidence suggests that this panic was driven by informational shocks in the face of asymmetric information about the true condition of bank portfolios.

In accordance with what has been standard practice, the JEH editorship went through another rotation as of the summer of 2002. Jan De Vries completed his four-year term as editor for the non-North American section, turning over the reins to C. Knick Harley at the University of Western Ontario. The handy cross-bay shuttle system between Berkeley and the North American office at Stanford has thus been replaced by a long-distance, crosscountry axis, thus far without noticeable loss of efficiency.

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine “Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe” (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional “case-study” urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: “Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?” (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981–84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

To review a work which cites one's name in both acknowledgments and text is probably imprudent and quite possibly unethical. On the other hand, a rigorous self-denying ordinance would have drastic implications for the viability of academic book reviewing. Further justification for proceeding in the present instance is that Professor O'Day's references to my own work are not wholly one-sided, either praise or criticism. The following assessment of her latest book will seek to adopt an equally balanced—if not “professional”—approach.

Michael Turner, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton have assembled a data set based on a large number of English farm records (in the form of account books, wage/labor books, and memoranda books). Some of the fruits of this effort appeared previously in Turner, Beckett, and Afton's Agricultural Rent in England, 1690–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This new book employs a subset of 979 of these farm records to cast new light on some important aspects of English farm production in the period 1700 to 1914. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book comprises five substantive chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the records as a source; chapter 3 considers some aspects of farming practice (notably cropping patterns and fertilizer use); chapter 4 presents new estimates of wheat yields; chapter 5 presents new estimates of barley and oat yields; and chapter 6 presents new evidence on livestock weights. The most important findings of the book are that the overall growth in wheat, barley, and oat yields was much lower than is commonly thought, and that the main period of yield growth occurred between the 1820s and 1850s. The authors argue on this basis that the Agricultural Revolution can be fixed firmly in the period 1800 to 1850. The great strength of the book is that the data on which it is based are almost entirely new. For that reason, it is a very welcome contribution to our stock of knowledge, and both the authors and their funding body (the Leverhulme Foundation) are to be congratulated.

Ever since David Landes's seminal work on the French family firm and the interplay of culture and economics, French business history has wrestled with the question of French particularism and the role of family enterprise in determining business outcomes. For well over a quarter of a century, historians have challenged or qualified Landes's arguments, first by pointing to successful family enterprises in France or elsewhere, second by reassessing French economic performance in modern times, and third by identifying other factors to explain slower growth in macro or micro terms. Robert J. Smith's thought-provoking study of Bouchayer et Viallet, a medium-sized French firm that rose and fell on family leadership and culture, squarely confronts, once again, the issue of family influence on business success and failure. Combining access to family papers with an astute appraisal of personality and context, Smith has produced a first-rate inquiry into the dynamics of family business firms. Mindful of the fact that family firms still account for a predominant part of GNP, but that few family firms continue as such for more than several generations, Smith asks how family control and values contributed to the success of Bouchayer et Viallet yet also braked growth at a middling level and ultimately undermined the continuity of the company. Intended as a case study in the trajectory of family enterprise, Smith weaves together business, family, and cultural history in exemplary ways that will benefit practitioners of all three fields and that demonstrate the value of the first approach for studying and writing the second and the third.

This volume is a collection of nineteen essays, seventeen of which summarize the economic history of the individual autonomous regions established in Spain as part of the transition to democratic government that began in 1975. The last two essays are valiant efforts to synthesize some of the information in the first seventeen. The first of the concluding essays discusses the persistence of pre-nineteenth-century structures in Spain during the nineteenth century. The second examines the relationship of the various autonomous regions within Spain to the European Union.

One strain of French structuralism has argued for the existence of long-run economic cycles driven by Marxist class and economic dynamics. Vincent Carpentier employs this approach in his study of the relationship between economic and educational change in the United Kingdom over the past two centuries. The basic framework was developed by Carpentier's mentor, Louis Fontvielle of the University of Montpellier, who has used it to examine the same relationship for France. According to this framework, leading modern economies such as those of France and the United Kingdom over the past two centuries have experienced four Kondratieff cycles of 50 years duration each. During the first three cycles, the level of resources devoted to education tended to move counter-cyclically; in the fourth cycle, the relationship reversed to move pro-cyclically. Fontvielle's explanation of this pattern is that during the first three cycles, during expansionary phases, high returns to physical capital implied pressures to cut back on public educational investments while during downturns, social stresses and contradictions in the system led to expanding educational investments. However in the fourth cycle, since 1945, both the rise of the welfare state and the increasing contribution of an educated labor force to productivity due to the increasing importance of science-based technical change resulted in the level of educational investments moving pro-cyclically.

Ten articles and a rich selective bibliography demonstrate the vitality of Historical Demography research in Belgium. In the introductory article, the editors sum up the main progress of the discipline in Belgium since 1981 and present an updated impressive commented bibliography. Belgian researchers have broken down many stereotypes. For instance, the process of industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium did not affect the traditional urban network in a spectacular way. Old-established cities and towns like Ghent, Leuven, Verviers, and Charleroi—that receive a special attention in this volume—continued to be important urban centers as they were well before the Industrial Revolution. The stereotype of a massive rural exodus generated by the industrialization is definitively overcome. By adopting a micro-research approach, Katleen Dillen shows that migration was mostly a positive choice and less disruptive than usually considered because it took place in a dense and vivid social network (“From One Textile Centre to Another: Migrations from the District of Ghent to the City of Armentières (France) During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 431–52). This absence of dramatic change in migration pattern during the industrialization—which is therefore opposite to the situation observed in the Ruhr during the same period—explains why there was no difference in fertility intensity and calendar between migrant people and the sedentary population of the industrial area of Charleroi. Interestingly Flemish migrants to Charleroi adopted the same demographic behavior as the native Walloon people. So, according to Thierry Eggerickx, the main determinant of fertility behavior is the living conditions at the place of arrival rather than the geographical and cultural origin. Eggerickx also emphasizes that the beginning of the demographic transition coincided with the economic crisis of 1873–1892. However, until now the relationship between changes in demographic behavior and economic upheaval remains unclear (“The Fertility Decline in the Industrial Area of Charleroi During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”). The social network should probably have played a key role during that period of economic crisis. Indeed, the importance of a dense social network clearly appears as far as the illegitimate fertility in Leuven during the economic crisis of the mid-nineteenth century is concerned. Jan Van Bavel demonstrates that the risks of pregnancy before age 26 and subsequent marriage chances did not result from isolation in town (Leuven), but that sexual activity of unmarried women of courtship age was, on the contrary, a sign of integration within the local community. However what was the role of the economic crisis on the behavior of these women? (“Malthusian Sinners: Illegitimate Fertility and Early Marriage in Times of Economic Crisis: A Case Study in Leuven, 1846–1856”). Leuven's urban society in the nineteenth century is also the place to explore the relation between age homogamy and the increasing importance of romantic love. Bart Van de Putte and Koen Matthijs question Shorter's theory by demonstrating that romantic love did not involve the lower classes. The only clear cultural change in Leuven was the spread of what is today called “a conservative model of marriage life” in which the patriarchal tradition was mixed with new family centered values (“Romantic Love and Marriage. A Study of Age Homogamy in Nineteenth Century Leuven”). This model of marriage behavior seems to correspond to the Catholic Church's doctrine on matrimonial matters. The Belgian Catholic Church managed quite well to adapt itself to social changes of the nineteenth century (Paul Servais, “The Church and the Family in Belgium, 1850–1914”). Mortality has attracted fresh research. Michel Oris and George Alter explore the relationship between migration to the city and mortality pattern. In industrial towns, migration had a positive impact on mortality in the short-term, because the newcomers were healthier than natives of the same age. However, the place of arrival—the new industrial milieu—rapidly affected the children of the migrants who were disproportionately exposed to urban epidemiological conditions. Alter and Oris stress the existence of a "epidemiological depression" between 1846 and 1880, which will need further investigation. Moreover, migration to the industrial cities was at the origin of a specific pattern of mortality: high level of infant and child mortality, lower level of adult mortality (“Paths to the City and Roads to Death: Mortality and Migration in East Belgium During the Industrial Revolution”). The persistent high level of infant mortality at the turn of the twentieth century is confirmed by Marc Debuisson's enquiry covering the whole territory of Belgium (“The Decline of Infant Mortality in the Belgian Districts at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”), meanwhile Jeroen Backs observes an increasing discrepancy between upper classes and poor people in front of death. The inequality results from a growing infant and child mortality (“Mortality in Ghent, 1850–1950: A Social Analysis of Death”).

The connection between nationalism and economic development is an important subject, and the contributors to the volume before us are to be commended for tackling it. But the significance of contributions to edited volumes in humanities and the social sciences rarely extends beyond their symbolic function—of serving as memorabilia to the rites and ceremonies in which scholarly conviviality finds its chief expression. Thus they are forgotten almost as soon as they appear in print, similarly to the elegant menus of formal dinners and wedding invitations, and for all intents and purposes are lost to the world of learning. Their only chance to escape this sad fate in most cases depends on the clarity, originality, and persuasiveness of the editors' vision, which may claim and hold the reader's attention, while creating a conceptual framework within which each individual essay acquires an added meaning. The editors of Economic Change and the National Question in Twentieth-Century Europe fail to provide such a framework, and the result is a collection of historical trivia with no more intellectual interest than any limited amount of raw data awaiting an interpreter.

Italy's transformation in little more than a century from a backward, agricultural periphery to one of the world's leading countries is one of economic history's success stories. Especially successful were the "economic miracle" years of 1950–1963, during which Italy maintained rates of growth second only to those of Japan and Germany and largely completed the structural transition to a modern, industrial economy. Rolf Petri argues that this success was built on a foundation laid in the 1930s and '40s by the fascist policy of autarchia. Autarchy policy identified and gave a decisive push to precisely those industries that proved most dynamic in the economic miracle. Employing a wide range of tools, from macroeconomic policy, through administrative control of foreign trade and the allocation of credit, to direct participation in the form of state-owned enterprises, the fascist regime created and nurtured firms, supported research and development activities, and encouraged investment in new physical plant and licensing of foreign technology. While the author eschews any statements about whether autarchia was necessary, good, or efficient and does not hide its shortcomings and failures, the flavor of this account is nonetheless positive. This contrasts with most other assessments, which have deemed autarchy policy contradictory and ad hoc, the cause of enormous waste and gross misallocation of resources.

This book provides a detailed investigation of the impact of the 1956 Restrictive Trade Practices Act on the intensity of competition in the United Kingdom. In my experience, American economists are usually traumatized to discover that the 1956 Act allowed firms to register restrictive trade agreements, including explicit schemes to fix prices and that by the end of 1959, firms had registered 2,240 agreements in the clear expectation that the newly established Restrictive Practices Court would take a relaxed view about these restrictions on competition. In fact, the Court generally took a tough pro-competition stance and after a few landmark cases where restrictive agreements were judged to be against the public interest, many of the registered agreements were abandoned voluntarily or modified substantially. This episode thus provides the raw material for assessing the impact of an intensification of competition on economic performance. George Symeonidis uses the theoretical framework of John Sutton to assess the effects of this intensification of competition. The main focus is on the upshot for concentration, although the effects on advertising intensity, innovation, and profitability are also considered. Disappointingly, perhaps, there is no discussion of the effects on productivity.