Premodern human capital accumulation helps to explain the exceptional growth performance of the Japanese economy in the last hundred years. Prior to this century informal institutions were more important for human capital formation than were the more formal ones familiar today. This paper examines a few seminal changes—national market formation, population control, and the involvement of farmers in rural administration—that were primarily responsible for the emergence of economically responsive, more productive individuals in rural Japan.

This paper attempts to make a contribution, both in method and in substance, to the debate about the timing and extent of market orientation in pre-industrial New England agriculture. The method consists in testing five quantifiable hypotheses, with data from manuscript account books and daybooks. The results, in repeated trials, confirm the influence of the market on the rural economy of Massachusetts from very early on.

This study is based on the manuscript accounts of the Madrid Treasury for 1784– 1807. It confirms the customary view of an inexorable descent into bankruptcy, but also shows why this situation arose. A detailed analysis of receipts demonstrates the importance of colonial revenues and the stability of traditional income sources. In wartime, such as repeatedly plagued the country, the former was jeopardized and the latter proved too inelastic to respond to rising demand. On balance, the inescapable conclusion is that Spain was a limited fiscal entity which could not meet the challenge of a revolutionary era without breaking decisively with the restrictive structures of the Old Regime.

This paper examines the proposition that U.S. manufacturing experienced biased technical change during the period 1850–1919. Tests for bias, in Hicksian terms, are conducted using the translog cost dual. Redefined census data permit these tests to be made at the two-digit level of industry classification and with four inputs considered—labor, capital, materials, and a residual factor input. The tests demonstrate that labor-saving and capital-using biases existed, but material-using biases also were present. Furthermore, the patterns of bias varied considerably from industry to industry and often were of such a magnitude as to overpower ordinary substitution effects.

The present study dealing with Russia and Germany undertakes to investigate the practical effect of tariffs on business and entrepreneur rather than the oft-discussed role of tariffs in international politics. Evidence from German industrial archives demonstrates that businesses were less concerned with tariff issues than one might expect from firms depending on exports. It shows that impediments other than customs duties (expenditures for credit, service, freight, investment, marketing; and competition, restrictions imposed on government orders, subventions, production costs abroad, technological changes) by far overshadowed inhibiting effects of tariffs. Circumspect responses of the entrepreneur helped to minimize the economic role tariffs played.

The debate over wage and price controls has taken a highly stylized form. Advocates of controls stress the direct effect on the obvious problem, inflation, whereas critics stress the side effects. This paper measures and compares the effects of controls during the four periods when controls have been used in the United States in the twentieth century. Although tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the price effects, the size of the administrative bureaucracies, and so forth, the clearest lesson, as usual, is that the issue warrants further investigation by economic historians because it is important, and because the historical record is surprisingly rich.