We noted in chapter 1 that the most important of our three aims in this text was to enable our readers to read, understand, and evaluate articles or books that make use of modern quantitative methods to support their analyses of historical questions. We selected four specific case studies that we have referred to and used as illustrations at various points in preceding chapters. In this and the following chapter we want to look more closely at each of these studies, and to see in particular how their models were specified, how any technical problems such as autocorrelation or simultaneity were handled, and how the regression coefficients, standard errors (and t-ratios or prob-values), and other statistical results were interpreted and related to the historical issues addressed in the articles.

The present chapter covers two studies investigating the causes of unemployment in inter-war Britain and of the nineteenth-century emigration from Ireland to the United States and other countries. Chapter 15 is devoted to the impact of the Old Poor Law on relief payments, earnings, and employment in England in the 1830s, and to the factors that influenced children's decisions to leave the family home in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. We assume that students will by now have carefully read the case studies and thought about the institutional and historical questions with which they deal.