The English family in the early modern period is viewed in the perspective of reciprocity: an exchange of goods that involves giving and obtaining something in return. Reciprocal interactions between parents and children extended throughout the life course and were not confined to infancy or...

The rescue of persecuted minorities - such as the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe -is seen in this paper as taking place in a peculiar market. In such a market rescuers face at least two dilemmas. Firstly, they might be willing to help but be uncertain how to go about rescuing. Secondly, they might...

Studies of consumption in early modern Europe fall into two groups. Some have looked at the overall supply of nutritional components to the average consumer in an attempt to trace standards of living. Others have examined the changing demand for particular goods by specific consumers to...

Analysis of new comparable series on output and employment between 1900 and 2000 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela indicates that productivity growth was significantly higher and less volatile during the middle decades of the century than in the opening and closing...

Interpreting the role of expanding transport in overall production growth in the nineteenth century is still hampered by our lack of understanding of how much and when ocean shipping costs began to fall. This paper exploits new output and freight rate data for one of the world`s largest merchant...

Constructing an agricultural output series requires a rational economic basis on which to convert one crop into another, and a conversion method using only the information which we have at our disposal. The traditional method fails on both counts. We develop two alternative methods. The first is...

This paper contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labour market to interwar Germany, using a new quarterly data set. The basic model is extended to capture the effects of the tariff wage under the Weimar Republic...

Volunteering by young adults for working in Third World countries on development projects emerged in Britain the late 1950s. Three decades later, the countrys largest volunteering sending agency, Voluntary Service Overseas, had sent more than 21,000 people abroad. The most common explanation for...

A pronounced cycle of car sales in the 1950s is explained in terms of styling competition and consumer preferences. An oligopolistic industry concentrated on non-price competition, and responded to perceived consumer demand for styling and status, with an accelerated product cycle. Demand was...