This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has...

Sears Roebuck and Co. faced similar challenges in the 1920s and the 1980s. On the strength of the early period's strategic investment decisions, the company grew into the nation's largest retailer and a pervasive factor in the economy. In the later period, unanswered challenges nearly destroyed...

This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to...

There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description, represented by the views of Ashton and Landes, sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has...

This paper surveys the economy of New England in the half-century following 1830. It begins by discussing reasons why manufacturing grew in the United States and especially in New England. The paper surveys the outputs of New England industry, particularly machine tools and textiles. It then...

This paper augments the new historical literature on factor price convergence. The focus is on the late nineteenth century, when economic convergence among the current OECD countries was dramatic; and the focus is on the convergence between Old World and New, by far the biggest participants in...

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate...

Dissatisfaction with the high transaction costs of compensating workers for their injuries led seven states in the 1910s to enact legislation requiring that employers insure their workers' compensation risks through exclusive state insurance funds. This paper traces the political-economic...

This paper estimates child mortality by race and nativity for the U.S. as a whole and the Death Registration Area based on the public use micro- samples of the 1900 and 1910 censuses. We compare indirect estimates to mortality rates and parameters based on published census and vital statistics...

Recent scholarly literature explains the spread of in-house research labs during the early 20th century by pointing to the information problems involved in contracting for technology. We argue that these difficulties have been overemphasized and that in fact a substantial trade in patented...