February 20: American Capital II: Natural Resources and American Industrial Leadership

Reading Notes

• Gavin Wright (1990), "The Origins of American Industrial Success," AER 80 (September).

• R. Nelson and G. Wright (1992), "The Rise and Fall of American Technological Leadership," JEL (December), pp. 1931-64.

• Nathan Rosenberg (1963), "Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry, 1840-1910," JEH (December): 414-443

• W. Devine (1983), "From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification," JEH (June), pp. 347-72.

February 27: Broad Comparative Patterns

Reading Notes

• Paul M. Romer (1996), "Why, Indeed in America?" AER (May): 202-206.
• R. Easterlin (1981), "Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?" Journal of Economic History (March), pp. 1-20.
  Gregory Clark (1987), "Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons From the Cotton Mills" JEH 47 (March 1987).
• Moses Abramovitz (1986), "Catching Up, Forging Ahead, Falling Behind," JEH .
• William Nordhaus (1997), "Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not".

March 6: American Labor II: Skills, Education, and the Birth of a Middle-Class Society

Reading Notes

• Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (1998), "The Origins of Technology-Skill Complementarity," QJE (August).
• Richard Freeman (1998), "Spurts in Union Growth."
• Claudia Goldin (1999), "The Returns to Skill in the United States Across the Twentieth Century."
• Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (1999), "Education and Income in the Twentieth Century: Evidence from the Praries."
• Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo (1992), "The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century," QJE 107 (February).

March 13: The Great Depression in America I: Causes and Course

Reading Notes

• Eugene White (1990), "The Stock Market Boom and the Crash of 1929," JEP 4:2 (Spring), pp. 67-83.

• Christina Romer (1990): "The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression," QJE 105:3 (August), pp. 597-624.

• Ben Bernanke (1995), "The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach," JMCB 27:1 (February), pp. 1-28. http://papers.nber.org/papers/W4814.

• Charles Calomiris (1993), "Financial Factors in the Great Depression," JEP 7:2 (Spring), pp. 61-85.

• Christina Romer (1993), "The Nation in Depression," JEP 7:2 (Spring), pp. 19-39.

• Peter Temin (1993), "Transmission of the Great Depression," JEP 7:2 (Spring), pp. 87-102.

March 20: The Great Depression in America II: Consequences

Reading Notes

• Robert Margo (1993), "Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s," JEP 7 (Spring).

• J.R. Vernon (1994), "World War II Fiscal Policies and the End of the Great Depression," JEH .

• J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," JEP 10:3 (Summer), pp. 41-53.

• Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote (2001) "Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have a European-Style Welfare System?"

April 10: The Post-WWII Golden Age

Reading Notes

• Gavin Wright (1987), "The Economic Revolution in the American South," JEP .

• Sue Bowden and Avner Offer (1994), "Household Appliances and the Use of Time," Economic History Review 47: 725-748.

• DeLong, J. Bradford, and Barry Eichengreen (1993): "The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program". http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Marshall_Large.pdf.

April 17: Managing the Economy I: The Inflation of the 1970s

Reading Notes

• J. Bradford DeLong (1997): "America’s Peacetime Inflation," in C. Romer and D. Romer (eds.), Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy, Chicago/London 1997. http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Peacetime_Inflation.pdf.

• Lawrence J. Christiano and Christopher Gust (1999): "The Great Inflation of the 1970s."
  http://www.faculty.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/christiano/research/1970s/figure.pdf.

April 24: Managing the Economy II: The Size of the Business Cycle

Reading Notes

• Bordo, Michael D. and Anna J. Schwartz (1997): "Monetary Policy Regimes and Economic Performance: The Historical Record," NBER Working Paper No. 6201.

• Arthur Burns (1960), "Progress Toward Economic Stability," AER.

• Christina Romer (1986), "New Estimates of Prewar Gross National Product and Unemployment," JEH (June), pp. 341-52.

• Christina Romer, "Changes in Business Cycles (1999)," JEP 13 (Spring).

May 1: American Labor III: Recent Inequality Trends

Reading Notes

• Gavin Wright (1991), "Understanding the Gender Gap: A Review Article," JEL : 1153-63.

• Simon Kuznets (1955), "Economic Growth and Income Inequality," AER (March 1955), pp. 1-28.

• Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (1999), "The Returns to Skill in the United States across the Twentieth Century," NBER Working Paper no. 7126 (May).

• J. Smith and Finis Welch (1989), "Black Economic Progress after Myrdal," JEL (June), pp. 519-40, 557-61.

• J.H. Donohue and J. Heckman (1991), "Continuous vs. Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy," JEL (December), pp. 1603-14 (introduction and section I).

May 8: Summing Up

Reading Notes

• J.B. DeLong (2000), "Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the 20th Century," NBER Working Paper no. 7602 (March).

• Lant Pritchett (1997), "Divergence, Big Time," JEP (Summer), pp. 3-17.

• Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner (1995), "Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration," BPEA, vol. 1, pp. 1-11, 35-52.

• Paul David (1990), "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox," AER (May), pp. 355-60.

• Robert Gordon (2000), "Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?," JEP .

AER–American Economic Review

BPEA–Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

JEH–Journal of Economic History

JEL–Journal of Economic Literature

JEP–Journal of Economic Perspectives