This essay provides an historical background for understanding the statistics on veterans that will appear in the millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. It describes changes in the number of veterans, and in the benefits provided by governments to veterans, from...

To cover fully the economics of war would require encyclopedia unto itself. Here I will provide brief introductions to four questions: (1) to what extent did economic forces cause America's wars, (2) after going to war, how has the United States managed the reallocation of resources, (3) how has...

This paper contains all of the statistical results underlying our paper The Origin and Diffusion of Shocks to Regional Interest Rates in the United States, 1880-2002. It also contains a table of the underlying data, and a discussion of how the data was constructed.

During World War II Americans were asked to salvage a long list of materials for the war effort including paper, tin, iron and steel, rubber, and even silk stockings and cooking fat. Stories about the salvage drives have become a staple in both popular and scholarly histories of the home front,...

The great surge in munitions production in World War II, which reached its peak in 1943, was produced by a building boom launched in 1941 and 1942. Resources were drawn rapidly to war production centers by financial incentives and other personal and corporate motives such as patriotism. This...

The United States is often taken to be the exemplar of the benefits of a monetary union. Since 1788 Americans, with the exception of the Civil War years, have been able to buy and sell goods, travel, and invest within a vast area without ever having to be concerned about changes in exchange...

In this paper we argue that adherence to the gold standard rule of convertibility of national currencies into a fixed weight of gold served as `a good housekeeping seal of approval' which facilitated access by peripheral countries to foreign capital from the core countries of western Europe. We...

One of the most sustained uses of economic warfare by the United States, at least judged by the variety of means used and the issue at stake, occurred in Spain and Portugal during WWII. We provide an overview of this episode by weaving together findings from the secondary literature and from new...

It is frequently claimed that World War II contributed to the growth of big government in the United States. One theory is that agencies that were given additional resources or authority during the war were able to retain them after the war because the agencies and their supporters were able to...

According to the standard accounts of the mobilization of resources in the United States during WWII, things went badly in the beginning because the agencies in charge were given insufficient authority and were mismanaged. But then in 1943 the story continues, the War Production Board installed...