Books in the Markets and Governments in Economic History series

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was enacted by Congress in June of 1933 to assist the nation's recovery during the Great Depression. Its passage ushered in a unique experiment in US economic history: under the NIRA, the federal government explicitly supported, and in some cases enforced, alliances within industries. Antitrust laws were suspended, and companies were required to agree upon industry-level "codes of fair competition" that regulated wages and hours and could implement anti-competitive provisions such as those fixing prices, establishing production quotas, and imposing restrictions on new productive capacity. The NIRA is generally viewed as a monolithic program, its dramatic and sweeping effects best measurable through a macroeconomic lens. In this pioneering book, however, Jason E. Taylor examines the act instead using microeconomic tools, probing the uneven implementation of the act's codes and the radical heterogeneity of its impact across industries and time. Deconstructing the Monolith employs a mixture of archival and empirical research to enrich our understanding of how the program affected the behavior and well-being of workers and firms during the two years NIRA existed as well as in the period immediately following its demise.

Fresh water has become scarce and will become even more so in the coming years, as continued population growth places ever greater demands on the supply of fresh water. This book draws on historical sources to trace the emergence of the current framework for resolving water-rights issues to California in the 1850s, during the Gold Rush.

Looking at the history of the United States with a focus on three diseases - smallpox, typhoid fever, and yellow fever, this book shows how constitutional rules and provisions that promoted individual liberty and economic prosperity also influenced the country's ability to eradicate infectious disease.

A history of municipal public finance in Brazil in the last half of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth.

"Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace India's economic growth since 1947 and the legal reforms that have allowed it to settle in, however unevenly and tenuously, in the shadow of the stagnating effects of colonial rule. Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy portrays a long shadow of Indian "path dependence"-the persistence of colonial-era legal practices and institutions-interrupted by a series of reactive, dramatic departures from colonial inertia aimed at achieving quick or corrective growth and regulation. Roy and Swamy address five principal questions: How have new laws emerged in India? Does the explanation lie with colonialism or with post-independence politics and economic change? How were laws shaped by egalitarian goals in the Indian democracy with its universal adult suffrage? When did laws constrain economic growth? And to what extent did case law and legislation affect the evolution of law, which was also shaped by politics and the quality of legal infrastructure? Each of these questions brings together different threads of India's economic transformation and social/political history, and the format allows the authors to go deep on the country's most important market sectors and their surrounding economic and political histories. These sections include: colonialist influences on laws governing land and natural resources; politics and labor; and the alternating stifling effects of the country's economic policies and legal systems. In Roy and Swamy's telling, inadequate legal infrastructure has often been the country's primary impediment to economic growth during the last century, and it remains a primary reason that India's future may not be as bright as advertised"--