<DIV>Following the approach of R. M. Hartwell, the influential historian of the British Industrial Revolution, these essays explore the cultural contexts and institutional constraints that have shaped growth and development over the past two centuries. <I>Capitalism in Context</I> offers new perspectives on...</i></div>

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...

In this paper we employ microeconomic evidence on the unemployment experiences of American males to evaluate the sensitivity of unemployment to business cycle fluctuations in the late nineteenth century as compared to the mid-twentieth century. Our results indicate a substantial decline in the...