I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic income shocks at that time, they mitigated fluctuations in indispensable consumption during economic hardship. In terms of risk-coping mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that savings institutions helped mitigate vulnerabilities and that both using borrowing institutions and adjusting labor supply served as risk-coping strategies among households with less savings.

Robert W. Fogel was a visionary economic historian, generous mentor, and eternal optimist whose works and lectures have informed and incited for more than half a century and whose writings will continue to do so for decades to come. He died on June 11, 2013 in his eighty-sixth year. He had co-taught a graduate course at the University of Chicago that quarter and in the weeks before he died he was planning his fall 2013 teaching. “I've often told my students I'm not retiring. You're going to have to carry me out in a wooden box. I'm having too much fun,” he remarked to a recent class.

If “colonial politics” denotes the objectives of a metropolitan power vis-à-vis its colony, then, for purposes of this paper, we may define “colonial psychology” as the frame of reference that determines the attitudes of “metropolitans” vis-à-vis the “colonial problem.” By “metropolitans” we mean the inhabitants of those Western societies that are linked to part of the non-West by the historical, political, economic and psychological ties that have always accentuated the dominance of the West. By “colony” we shall here mean only the areas with a multiracial population of which a white element considers itself so integrally a part that it feels itself more strongly associated with its own “colonial” society than with the metropolitan country of its origins.

This paper applies a feminist analysis to the measurement of living standards during the 1970s. It suggests that widely made assumptions of homogeneous pooling and redistribution of income, labor, and expenditures within families mask inequalities and uneven changes in the living standards of wage-working husbands and wives. Two waves of the Panel Study of Income dynamics are used to create two rough indicators, that is, reproduction pay and surplus, to test for inequalities and uneven changes in 1968 and again in 1979. In general, the findings show differential living standards between husbands and wives when assumptions of homogeneous pooling and redistribution are not made. The paper concludes that the suggested rough indicators are useful for the measurement of living standards.