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When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war. Drawing information from government documents, soldiers' journals, and one of the most extensive research projects about Union Army soldiers ever undertaken, Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's de...
The conditions for sustainable growth and development are among the most debated topics in economics, and the consensus is that institutions matter greatly in explaining why some economies are more successful than others over time. This book explores the relationship between economic conditions, growth, and inequality.
This volume honours the contributions Claudia Goldin has made to scholarship and teaching in economic history and labour economics. The chapters address some closely integrated issues: the role of human capital in the long-term development of the American economy, trends in fertility and marriage, and women's participation in economic change.
Taking a longer view than most literature on economic development, Richard A. Easterlin stresses the enormous contrast between the collective experience of the last half century in both developed and developing countries and what has gone before. An economic historian and demographer, the author writes in the tradition of the "new economic history," drawing on economic theory and quantitative evidence to interpret the historical experience of economic theory and population growth. He reaches beyond the usual disciplinary limits to draw, as appropriate, on sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, and the history of science. The book will be of interest not only to social scient...
Nestled in Switzerland’s alpine Engadin Valley, St. Moritz stands on its own amidst a sea of celebrated ski resorts in that it has long maintained an elusive allure. The winter home of personalities from Gunter Sachs and Gianni Agnelli to Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, John Lennon, and Claudia Schiffer, there are few places in the world that manage to unite so many of the top names in cinema, art, and fashion all in one place, year after year. Author Dora Lardelli takes the reader on a journey through Chanel and Hitchcock’s favorite haunts and the hidden parties at Badrutt’s Palace where royalty goes to play, without forgetting the natural beauty, village charm and arch...
Workers' compensation was arguably the first widespread social insurance program in the United States--before social security, Medicare, or unemployment insurance--and the most successful form of labor legislation to emerge from the early progressive movement. In A Prelude to the Welfare State, Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor challenge widespread historical perceptions by arguing that workers' compensation, rather than being an early progressive victory, succeeded because all relevant parties--labor and management, insurance companies, lawyers, and legislators--benefited from the ruling.
In this unique anthology, Steckel and Floud coordinate ten essays that bring a new perspective to inquiry about standard of living in modern times. These papers are arranged for international comparison, and they individually examine evidence of health and welfare during and after industrialization in eight countries: the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. The essays incorporate several indicators of quality of life, especially real per capita income and health, but also real wages, education, and inequality. And while the authors use traditional measures of health such as life expectancy and mortality rates, this volume stands alone in its extensive use of new "anthropometric" data—information about height, weight and body mass index that indicates changes in nations' well-being. Consequently, Health and Welfare during Industrialization signals a new direction in economic history, a broader and more thorough understanding of what constitutes standard of living.
This book paints a portrait of social life in America by providing an accessible discussion of empirical economics research on issues such as illegal immigration, health care and climate change. All the studies in this book use the same data source: individual responses to the American Community Survey (ACS), the nation's largest household survey. The author identifies studies that clearly illustrate core econometric methods (such as regression control and difference-in-differences), replicates key statistics from the studies, and helps the reader to carefully interpret the statistics. This book has a companion website with replication files in R and Stata format. The Appendix to this book c...
Publisher Description
The "Argentine disappointment"—why Argentina persistently failed to achieve sustained economic stability during the twentieth century—is an issue that has mystified scholars for decades. In Straining the Anchor, Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor provide many of the missing links that help explain this important historical episode. Written chronologically, this book follows the various fluctuations of the Argentine economy from its postrevolutionary volatility to a period of unprecedented prosperity to a dramatic decline from which the country has never fully recovered. The authors examine in depth the solutions that Argentina has tried to implement such as the Caja de Conversión, the nation's first currency board which favored a strict gold-standard monetary regime, the forerunner of the convertibility plan the nation has recently adopted. With many countries now using—or seriously contemplating—monetary arrangements similar to Argentina's, this important and persuasive study maps out one of history's most interesting monetary experiments to show what works and what doesn't.