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The population base in both the United States and Japan is growing older and, as those populations age, they provoke heretofore unexamined economic consequences. This comparative volume, the third in the joint series offered by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Japan Center for Economic Research, explores those consequences, drawing specific attention to four key areas: incentives for early retirement; savings, wealth, and asset allocation over the life cycle; health care and health care reform; and population projections. Given the undeniable global importance of the Japanese and U.S. economies, these chapters shed light on the complex correlations between aging and economic behavior. This work not only deepens our understanding of the Japanese and American economic landscapes but, through careful examination of the comparative social and economic data, clarifies the complex relation between aging societies, public policies, and economic outcomes.

Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world's least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today's most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. This book explores this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today. The chapters address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. The chapters show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business.

In the global marketplace of ideas, few realms spark as much conflict as religion. For millions of people, it is an integral part of everyday life, reflected by a widely divergent supply of practices and philosophical perspectives. Yet, historically, the marketplace has not always been competitive. While the early Common Era saw competition between Christianity, Judaism, and the many pagan cults, Roman Christianity came eventually to dominate Western Europe. Using basic concepts of economic theory, this book explains the origin and subsequent spread of Roman Christianity, showing first how the standard concepts of risk, cost, and benefit can account for the demand for religion. Then, drawing on the economics of networking, entrepreneurship, and industrial organization, it explains Christianity’s rapid ascent. Like a business, the church developed sound business strategies that increased its market share to a near monopoly in the medieval period. The book offers a look at the dynamics of Christianity’s rise, as well as how aspects of the church’s structure—developed over the first millennium—illuminate a number of critical problems faced by the church today.

This book is a collection of seven original research papers by leading scholars of American economic history. The papers engage a diverse but clearly related set of topics regarding the establishment and growth of various kinds of economic enterprises that were central to American economic development. Prominent themes include changes in business organization and governance, bank behavior and credit markets, and scale economies in nineteenth-century manufacturing and agricultural production. The volume does not attempt to review and synthesize the literature on all aspects of American economic enterprise. Rather, the papers together provide inter-connected accounts of how businesses, banks, and credit markets promoted the transformation and growth of the American economy, as seen through a lens that focuses on how such enterprises were organized and operated. Most of the papers feature analyses of new or under-utilized archival sources. The emphasis on “enterprise” reflects the view that understanding modern economic growth requires attention to the historical context in which individuals came together to form voluntary associations whose goal was to provide goods and services to markets and, in doing so, to earn profits. Contributors include Jeremy Atack, Howard Bodenhorn, William Collins, Mary Hansen, Eric Hilt, Matthew Jaremski, Naomi Lamoreaux, Robert Margo, Alan Olmstead, Claudia Rei, Paul Rhode, Peter Rousseau, and Eugene White.

The political decisions made by the founding fathers were crucial to the success of the early republic. But the economic decisions they made were just as pivotal, ensuring the general welfare and common defense of the United States for decades to come. This book explores these economic choices and their profound influence on American life, westward expansion, and influence abroad. Among the topics covered are finance, trade, and monetary and banking policy, with a focus on the factors guiding those policies and their end result.

As awareness of the process of globalization grows and the study of its effects becomes increasingly important to governments and businesses (as well as to a sizable opposition), the need for historical understanding also increases. Despite the importance of the topic, few attempts have been made to present a long-term economic analysis of the phenomenon, one that frames the issue by examining its place in the long history of international integration. This volume collects eleven chapters doing exactly that and more. The first group of chapter explores how the process of globalization can be measured in terms of the long-term integration of different markets—from the markets for goods and commodities to those for labor and capital, and from the sixteenth century to the present. The second set of contributions places this knowledge in a wider context, examining some of the trends and questions that have emerged as markets converge and diverge: the roles of technology and geography are both considered, along with the controversial issues of globalization's effects on inequality and social justice, and the roles of political institutions in responding to them. The final group of essays addresses the international financial systems that play such a large part in guiding the process of globalization, considering the influence of exchange rate regimes, financial development, financial crises, and the architecture of the international financial system itself.

This book examines the origins of California surface water law in the earliest years of statehood: the decade of the 1850’s. This decade was dominated by a key event in California history, the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush comprised a major exogenous shock to the California economy, resulting in tremendous economic and population growth within an extremely short period of time, along with significant structural changes to the economy. Importantly, the Gold Rush caused a dramatic increase in the demand for water, a key factor input into placer mining. The increased use of water led to a large number of disputes among miners over its use, which set into motion a series of changes in how water rights were defined and how disputes over water rights were to be resolved. The emergence of California water law was a complex process that contained both formal and informal elements. A key component of the picture was the creation of basic legal principles within a network of mining camps. Many of these principles were subsequently incorporated into the official system of water law as promulgated by the courts. This book examines legal developments that governed disputes in three key areas: diversions of water, water quality, and dam failures. The resulting principles were broadly consistent with attempts to maximize rents within local water basins, including the minimization of various components of transaction costs, including enforcement and measurement costs.

The American economy has provided a level of well-being that has consistently ranked at or near the top of the international ladder. A key source of this success has been widespread participation in political and economic processes. This book chronicles the significance of America's open-access society and the roles played by government in its unrivaled success story. America's democratic experiment, the book shows, allowed individuals and interest groups to shape the structure and policies of government, which, in turn, have fostered economic success and innovation by emphasizing private property rights, the rule of law, and protections of individual freedom. In response to new demands for infrastructure, America's federal structure hastened development by promoting the primacy of states, cities, and national governments. More recently, the economic reach of American government expanded dramatically as the populace accepted stronger limits on its economic freedoms in exchange for the increased security provided by regulation, an expanded welfare state, and a stronger national defense.

Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent economic theorists of the twentieth century, as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology, political philosophy, the history of ideas, and the methodology of the social sciences. This book offers us an intellectual biography of this pivotal social theorist. The book begins by providing the necessary background for understanding Hayek's thought, tracing the emergence, in fin-de-siècle Vienna, of the Austrian school of economics—a distinctive analysis forged in the midst of contending schools of thought. The second part of the book follows the path by which Hayek, beginning from the standard Austrian assumptions, gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but a broad range of social phenomena. The third part offers both an assessment of Hayek's arguments and, in an epilogue, an estimation of how Hayek's insights can help us to clarify and reexamine changes in the field of economics during the twentieth century. As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics: his works grew increasingly contrarian and evolved in striking—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—ways. The book's analysis situates Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences.

The twentieth century saw significant increases in both life expectancy and retirement rates—changes that have had dramatic impacts on nearly every aspect of society and the economy. Forecasting future trends in health and retirement rates, as we must do now, requires investigation of such long-term trends and their causes. To that end, this book draws on new data—an extensive longitudinal survey of Union Army veterans born between 1820 and 1850—to examine the factors that affected health and labor force participation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors consider the impacts of a variety of conditions—including social class, wealth, occupation, family, and community—on the morbidity and mortality of the group. The chapters investigate and address a number of special topics, including the influence of previous exposure to infectious disease, migration, and community factors such as lead in water mains. They also analyze the roles of income, health, and social class in retirement decisions, paying particular attention to the social context of disability. The book offers a clear view of the workings and complexities of life, death, and labor during the nineteenth century.