The debate over wage and price controls has taken a highly stylized form. Advocates of controls stress the direct effect on the obvious problem, inflation, whereas critics stress the side effects. This paper measures and compares the effects of controls during the four periods when controls have been used in the United States in the twentieth century. Although tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the price effects, the size of the administrative bureaucracies, and so forth, the clearest lesson, as usual, is that the issue warrants further investigation by economic historians because it is important, and because the historical record is surprisingly rich.

The lack of other data has made fiscally motivated house counts the main basis of pre-censal Irish population estimates in the past. The source is potentially treacherous: in this paper spatial autocorrelation analysis of house counts at the county level is used to monitor its reliability over time. The new house totals which emerge, coupled with new estimates of mean household size, yield a different picture of aggregate and provincial population change between 1700 and 1821 than suggested in Connell's classic work. The final section of the paper suggests an interpretation of population change consistent with our revised figures.

The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for servants in skilled occupations. The timing of the two steps can be explained as a function of the changing relative costs of indentured and slave labor in the markets for unskilled and skilled labor.

Several economic historians have suggested that economic instability in American agriculture was a primary cause of agrarian discontent during the late nineteenth century. This paper, in providing a rigorous analysis of the issue, presents estimates of economic instability in agriculture and evidence on the location and intensity of agrarian unrest for 14 northern states from 1866 to 1909. I statistically test for a relationship between the two. The results strongly suggest that late-nineteenth century agrarian unrest was directly related to a state's degree ofeconomic instability. This conclusion holds for the entire last third of the century and for several subperiods.

Some leading modern theories of exchange-rate determination are pitted against each other in explaining fundamental movements of the freely floating U.S. dollar in the foreign-exchange market during the greenback period, 1862–1878. A purchasing-power-parity theory augmented to incorporate interest-rate, and possibly income, effects provides the best explanation of the exchange rate. The standard works on the greenback period are subject to some amendments in light of the study.

This paper uses numismatic sources to estimate the volume of unaccounted currency issued during the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century. “Unaccounted currency” includes any currency issued by private business firms and by municipal and state governments. This money, unlike state bank notes and deposits and federal government currencies, was issued illegally, and not recorded in conventional statistical sources. Exact quantification, therefore, is next to impossible. The principal significance of this phenomenon is the credibility it gives to private competitive issues of money.

Between 1870 and 1930 production methods in American offices changed substantially as mechanical devices were introduced and work was subdivided and routinized. This paper explores connections between these technological advances and changes in clerical emplyment, particularly the employment of women in offices. A close correspondence is found between the timing of changes in the sex composition of clerical employment and the adoption of new techniques. It is argued that the new technology led to increased hiring of female clerical workers by reducing the form-specific skill requirements for clerical jobs.

Although cotton smuggling through the North's blockade of the South during the American Civil War has often been viewed as a highly profitable activity, only a small percentage of blockade-running ships made more than one run. New figures for capture rates reconcile these observations by showing that the risks of blockade running were substantial. Estimates are also provided for the amount of cotton smuggled through the blockade and of its disposition between the North and Europe.

Between 1852 and 1883 the nature and organization of work in the American shoe industry changed due to the introduction of machinery and the factory system. For generations before 1852 shoes had been made by hand in small workshops organized through a putting out system. Each artisan possessed the skill and tools to make an entire shoe by hand, and work was intertwined with family life. With the introduction of machinery, making a shoe was divided into many distinct tasks, each performed by a different worker, and work was moved into a factory where it came under closer supervision.