Economists and educational historians have put forward two major kinds of explanations for the coincidence between the industrial revolution and the development of mass public schooling in the United States. Industrial change, some maintain, created a demand for technicians, managers, skilled...

Economists often counsel against considering sunk costs in making decisions. But this advice is applicable in only a limited range of cases. Where the assets acquired through past investment are illiquid or specialized to a particular use, the advice to ignore prior commitments can be...

This essay considers the status of the new economic history from the vantage point of the mid-1980s. It discusses the historical and demographic factors that contributed to the golden age of academics in the United States (1957-1969), and how this, along with various intellectual factors,...

French optical telegraph represented a highly refined blend of software and hardware generating performance levels in long distance communication which were, given the limitations of the hardware, quite remarkable. Had the electromagnetic telegraph not become available, French optical...

This paper addresses a general theoretical question - the appropriate specification of the transactions demand for money - as well as a particular historical question: what triggered the Great Depression? Theoretically, fluctuations in the volume and value of asset exchanges in secondary asset...

A common procedure in productivity research is to use estimates of the stocks of physical capital as proxies for service flows. A number of authors propose cyclical adjustments for capital input which, if large enough, will eliminate findings of procyclicality in the behavior of TFP. This paper...