This paper investigates the impact of the abolition of the civil service exam on local governance in early twentieth-century China. Before the abolition, local elites collected surtaxes that financed local public goods, but they were supervised by the state and could lose candidacy for higher status if they engaged in corrupt behavior. This prospect of upward mobility (POUM) gave them incentives to behave well, which the abolition of the exam removed. Using anti-elite protests as a proxy for the deterioration of local governance, we find that prefectures with a higher POUM experienced more incidents of anti-elite protests after the abolition.

During the nineteenth century, U.S. manufacturers shifted away from the “hand labor” mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to “machine labor,” which was increasingly concentrated in steam-powered factories. This transition fundamentally changed production tasks, jobs, and job requirements. This paper uses digitized data on these two production modes from an 1899 U.S. Commissioner of Labor report to estimate the frequency and impact of the use of inanimate power on production operation times. About half of production operations were mechanized; the use of inanimate power raised productivity, accounting for about one-quarter to one-third of the overall productivity advantage of machine labor. However, additional factors, such as the increased division of labor and adoption of high-volume production, also played quantitatively important roles in raising productivity in machine production versus by hand.

This research examines whether an alternative exchange rate policy could have mitigated Germany’s recession from April 1930 to May 1932, when Heinrich Brüning was Reichskanzler of the Weimar Republic. Using an open-economy dynamic model as our analytical framework, we examine the arguments against adopting the devaluation policy. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that a widely held belief—that floating the Reichsmark would have led to high inflation—is unwarranted. Despite Germany’s high foreign debt, floating the Reichsmark would have led to less of a decline in both real GDP and employment for the country during the Great Depression.

U.S. military production during World War II increased at an impressive rate and led to large declines in unit costs. However, the literature has focused on elucidating detailed mechanisms behind this relationship, using small datasets on specific products. Here we take a step back and, looking at an unprecedently large collection of data, we show that both exogenous technological progress and endogenous effects from increasing production experience were important, in roughly similar proportions. The demand for military products was largely exogenous, and the correlation between production, cumulative production, and time was weak, limiting issues of reverse causality and multicollinearity.

We study the decisions of state-chartered banks to join the Fed in its first decade. Ours is the first study to combine state regulatory environment characteristics and individual bank characteristics to explain Fed membership choice. Regulatory environments that reduced the benefit of discount window access or increased the regulatory cost of joining the Fed led to fewer banks joining. Individual bank characteristics that affected the magnitude of benefits from accessing the discount window (either passing on liquidity risk reduction to respondents or reducing the member bank’s own seasonal liquidity risk) were even more important in determining which banks joined.

I believe that, through the Federal Reserve Banks, … the better shall we be equipped to cope with the problems ahead of us, of helping ourselves and of helping the world; I believe it to be the duty of every bank in the country to contribute its share in equipping our nation for this task; … I firmly believe that the future will belong to those banks—national or state—that are members of the Federal Reserve System.

—Paul Warburg, Speech at the New York State Bankers’ Association Convention, 9 June 1916

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913.

Disputes over whether the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution begin with the common assumption that natural philosophers and artisans formed distinct groups. In reality, these groups merged together through a diverse group of applied mathematics teachers, textbook writers, and instrument makers catering to a market ranging from navigators and surveyors to bookkeepers. Besides its direct economic contribution in diffusing useful numerical skills, this “practical mathematics” facilitated later industrialization in two ways. First, a large supply of instrument and watch makers provided Britain with a pool of versatile, mechanically skilled labor to build the increasingly complicated machinery of the late eighteenth century. Second, the less well-known but equally revolutionary innovations in machine tools—which, contrary to the Habbakuk thesis, occurred largely in Britain during the 1820s and 1830s to mass-produce interchangeable parts for iron textile machinery—drew on a technology of exact measurement developed for navigational and astronomical instruments.

How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We find suggestive evidence that distress labor supply by widows and rising wages help account for this result.