Introduction / William J. Hurst, Thomas B. Gold, and Jaeyoun Won -- Broadening the debate on xiagang : policy origins and parallels in history / Lei Guang -- Xiagang and the geometry of urban political patronage in China : celebrated state (once-) workers and state chagrin / Dorothy J. Solinger...

This paper examines the saving decisions of a large sample of turn-of-the-century working-class American families. We decompose each family's reported income into permanent and transitory components and then estimate marginal propensities to save from each component. Marginal propensities to...

This paper examines whether the saving decisions of a large sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop two econometric models to decompose...

"Shannon, Wally, and John built their lives around their place of work. Shannon, a white single mother, became the first woman to run the factory's dangerous furnaces at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and was proud of producing one of the world's top brands of steel bearings....