Books in the Studies in Economic History and Policy: USA in the Twentieth Century series

Panhandle Eastern's history shows the relationship between regulatory policy and the modern corporation. Entrepreneurs competed in an unregulated industry that became increasingly regulated and profitable, until finally in an era of business reorganization and deregulation, regulators changed the structure of the industry.

This book examines in detail the fiscal and more general economic crisis of New York State and City. The authors show that the crisis was as much the fruit of political manoeuvering as it was the outcome of long-term economic trends and fiscal ineptitude.

Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a particular, yet comprehensive, view of the economic history of Western Europe since the Renaissance. In the concluding essay, Professor Parker examines the break-up of the capitalist synthesis and speculates on its transmutation into other forms.

This book tells the story of how and why industrial research was established in America by two large and innovative corporations: General Electric and American Telephone and Telegraph. The author shows that important lessons can be drawn from the early efforts of these two corporations.

This 1985 book provides us with an innovative and insightful approach to the study of business-government relations in modern America. For anyone interested in seeing a more effective national industrial policy, this history should put the relationship of business and government in a critical new perspective.

This is a collection of essays by Simon Kuznets, winner of the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, dealing with 'modern economic growth' and the interrelations between demographic change and income inequality. An introduction by Professor Richard Easterlin discusses the relationship of the essays to the balance of Kuznets's writings.

Since the 1930s, US agriculture has undergone a revolution in productivity. Sally Clarke explains how government activity, by stabilizing prices, introducing new sources of credit, and prompting tool manufacturers to revise their business strategies, created a climate favorable to rapid gains in productivity.

This is a history of America's use of wage and price controls from colonial times to the 1970s. It explores the impact of controls on prices and productivity, side-effects such as the growth of black markets and the expansion of government, and the relationship between controls and monetary policy.

Richard Gillespie raises fundamental questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, and about the assumptions and evidence that underpin debates about worker productivity.

Elihu Thomson was a late-nineteenth-century American inventor who helped create the first electric lighting and power systems. One of the most prolific inventors in American history, Thomson was granted nearly 700 patents in a career spanning the 1880s to 1930s.

The essays in this book explore the forces behind modern economic growth, concentrating on the surge of growth since World War II. Essays include discussion of how Japan and Europe follow a set of circumstances and policies to sustain rapid growth, the contributions of education etc.

Focusing on the nineteenth-century experience of three US regions, the northeast, south and midwest, these essays trace the agricultural and industrial sources of wealth and growth that accounted for the country's development as a flourishing nation.

Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902-1980 provides a comprehensive, critical study of research and development in a large US corporation. Du Pont was among a handful of US corporations that established formal research and development laboratories at the turn of the century to improve competitive positions in their respective industries.

The story of the RCA VideoDisc is a rare inside look at a company and the way it conducts the complex process of science-based innovation. This book, first published in 1986, presents an absorbing account of how RCA shaped a sophisticated consumer electronics technology in a research and development effort that spanned fifteen years.

Michael Hogan shows how The Marshall Plan was more than an effort to put American aid behind the economic reconstruction of Europe. Professor Hogan's emphasis on integration is part of a major reinterpretation that sees the Marshall Plan as an extension of American domestic and foreign-policy developments stretching back through the interwar period to the Progressive Era.

This 1988 book focuses on the real puzzle of 1930s America: why did the economy fail to recover from the downturn of 1929-33? The author presents a convincing case that there were important long-run tendencies within the economy that are crucial to understanding this failure.