Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the     

Andrew Wender Cohen. The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83466-X, $60.00 (cloth).

The Racketeer’s Progress is an important contributionto the growing literature on the role of law in the relationshipbetween labor and capital. It focuses not on legislation orgovernment officials but on local and state courts, where, authorAndrew Wender Cohen argues, a legal revolution was underwayin the early decades of the twentieth century. Legal actionshifted from the defense of property through the convictionof union leaders for conspiracy to the prosecution of corruptunion leaders     

Robin Pearson. Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-1850. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-7546-336302, $99.95 (cloth).

Robin Pearson’s Insuring the Industrial Revolution providesa richly detailed account of the British fire insurance industrythrough the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas most previous accountshave focused on single companies, Pearson’s study encompassesthe entire industry of London and provincial firms and seeksto place the industry within the larger context of British economichistory. British economic historians have long overlooked the contributionof insurance, and service industries in general, to the nation’seconomic     

William R. Childs. The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. x+323 pp. ISBN 1-58544-452-9, $35.00.

In his new book, The Texas Railroad Commission: UnderstandingRegulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century, historianWilliam Childs explores the history of regulation in the contextof one of the most interesting state commissions in the UnitedStates. He provides a counterpoint to many economists’narrow analysis of regulation on the basis of efficiency. Regulation,he says, has to be understood as a social, cultural, and politicalphenomena operating within the federalist framework     

Jack Goody. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 0-7456-3190-8, $56.95 (cloth); 0-7456-3191-6, $21.95 (paper).

When and why did the West gain its current economic advantageover the rest of the world? This topic is the source of an animateddebate within the academy today. Jack Goody, a noted socialanthropologist, analyzes these questions and offers his ownviews in his new book, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. The participants in this debate often have been divided intotwo broad camps. On the one side, which I will call here theEuropeanists, are those who     

Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Whole Earth Catalog provided the commune-dwellers of the1960s with a forum in which to discuss tools and systems forbuilding alternative life styles. From Counterculture to Cybercultureexplains why and how the Catalog's perspective on tools andsystems became a dominant paradigm for information networksand the technology industry. Using archival material and hisown interviews with many key figures, Fred Turner has writtenan engrossing and in-depth account of the role the Catalog andits founder, Stewart Brand, played     

Trade liberalization and the allocation of labor between households and markets in a poor country

We consider the relationship between relative price changes and the allocation of labor between households and the formal wage labor market in the context of Vietnam's liberalization of its rice trade in the 1990s. Many individuals in poor economies work within their own household rather than in formal labor markets. We find that larger rice price increases in a community are associated with declines in hours adults devote to work within the household and increases in time spent in the wage labor market. We also observe increased specialization in household economic activities accompanying these shifts in hours towards wage work. Our results are consistent with the idea that a growth in the extent of the market shifts production and labor from households to markets during development, thereby inducing gains from specialization. Thus, the reallocation of labor between households and markets in response to a trade liberalization might be an important component in understanding the link between trade and growth in very poor economies, currently the focus of the Doha WTO negotiation round.     

外商直接投资对安徽产业结构的影响及对策分析

利用安徽1998-2007年的统计数据,实证分析FDI对安徽产业结构变动的影响作用,并根据检验结果提出应积极引导外商投资于农业及一些薄弱的第三产业部门,注意引导外商投资在制造业领域的流向,使安徽引进外资健康合理发展,进而促进安徽产业结构的进一步优化升级。     

河南国际劳务输出的类型与渠道刍议

在经济全球化进程中,作为人口和农业大省的河南,近些年国际劳务输出业务逐步发展壮大,但是在发展壮大的同时仍然存在劳务输出类型单一、劳务输出渠道不畅的问题。因此,河南省政府应放开劳务输出经营权限制、大力鼓励民间与个人形式的劳务输出、通过工程承包技术设备出口和对外投资扩大劳务输出等措施来促进河南省的国际劳务输出的快速发展。     

结构变化、行业劳动份额对中国初次分配的影响

利用企业层面的数据,从行业视角对中国的劳动份额及其变化进行实证研究。结果发现:与当前普遍认为劳动份额持续下降的看法不同,近年来中国劳动份额处于上升态势,这说明初次分配的恶化态势正得以改善,但是劳动份额仍然偏低,劳动者在初次分配中仍然处于不利地位;总体劳动份额的波动主要来源于行业内劳动份额的波动,两者表现为"齐升齐降",只是波动幅度有差异而已。对劳动份额波动的进一步分解表明,对于总体劳动份额的变化,行业内效应贡献了82.83%,而结构效应仅仅贡献了17.17%。     

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4204-4, $34.95 (cloth).

A curious blend of business and intellectual history, with anemphasis on the latter, Michael Augspurger’s An Economyof Abundant Beauty offers a reading of Fortune magazine fromits founding in 1930 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhowerin 1952. Distancing himself from other observers of the publicationwho have interpreted Fortune’s heavy coverage of highculture and aesthetics during the 1930s alongside more prosaicbusiness news as the result of a distinct split between a progressivestaff of writers, including James Agee and Archibald MacLeish,and more conservative editors and publisher Henry Luce, Augspurgerclaims to discern a     

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

农村劳动力迁移与中国工资收入不平等的地区差异:来自2005年全国人口抽样调查的证据

利用2005年全国1%人口抽样调查数据研究中国各地区农村劳动力流动和地区(县/区)内部工资性收入不平等的关系。中国地区间的差异是个人工资收入不平等最突出的决定因素,而地区内不平等程度也存在着很大的差别。农村劳动力人口的迁入有助于降低区内的收入不平等,而迁出则起相反的作用,而且这两种作用在县、县级市和市辖区间存在着显著差别。在研究中国劳动力流动与地区内和地区间的不平等关系时,应该从迁入、迁出两个角度分析其影响,并将城乡分割的二元劳动力市场状况考虑进来。     

Rethinking the area approach: Immigrants and the labor market in California

A framework that uses a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function with skill differentiation and integrated national labor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The employment (rather than wage) response to immigration by skill in a state reveals the production substitutability-complementarity between native and immigrant labor. This, in turn, reveals the degree to which immigrants stimulate or depress the demand for native labor. To estimate this elasticity, I use a novel instrument based on demographic characteristics of total Central American migrants or of the Mexican Population to predict immigration by skill level within California. Looking at immigration to California between 1960 and 2005 these estimates support the assumption of a nationally integrated labor market by skill and they support the hypothesis that natives and immigrants in the same education-experience group are not perfectly substitutable. This explains the counter-intuitive fact that there is a zero correlation between immigration and wage and employment outcomes of natives in the state.     

Hermann-J. Rupieper, Friederike Sattler and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds. Die mitteldeutsche Chemieindustrie und ihre Arbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert

This collection of fifteen articles is based on the proceedingsof a November 2003 conference held by the Martin-Luther Universitätin Mitteldeutschland, or Central Germany. Most people tend toforget that the area of Mitteldeutschland in the former easternGermany (German Democratic Republic or GDR), that is the areaaround Halle, Dessau, Leipzig, and Jena, was traditionally oneof the centers of German intellectual and economic life. MartinLuther posted his 95 Theses at a Wittenberg church. It was hometo such firms as the original     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by     

农村劳动力转移影响因素分析:29个省市的经验数据

在分析和评价传统理论和已有文献的基础上,突破单一的城乡收入差距影响农村劳动力转移的传统思维,构建出农村劳动力转移不仅受迁移地非农收入的实际效用因素的影响,受迁移成本变动因素影响的理论模型。根据全国29个省市1995-2006年的面板数据,经过单位根检验和协整关系检验,利用回归模型,估计分析了非农收入的实际效用因素和非农收入成本因素对农村劳动力转移的影响度。城乡收入差距、非农产业生产总值比率与农村劳动力转移呈正相关,城乡消费支出比率、城镇失业率分别作为农村劳动力转移的直接价格成本和就业风险成本与农村劳动力转移呈负相关关系。要进一步促进我国农村劳动力向城镇的合理转移,必须从两个方面着手:一是提高非农收入的实际效用,二是降低非农收入的成本率。     

国际贸易、技术变动对我国工业部门劳动收入份额的影响

文章较为系统地分析了国际贸易、技术进步等因素对中国工业部门劳动收入份额的影响。研究显示在1999～2009年期间,我国工业部门的劳动收入份额总体上呈现出缓慢下降的趋势,工业部门劳动收入份额变动主要是行业内部劳动力再配置的结果;利用中国工业部门21个细分行业的面板数据,通过系统广义矩方法对国际贸易、技术变革对行业劳动收入份额的影响进行计量分析表明,国际贸易具有较为显著的提高我国工业部门行业劳动份额的效应,而技术进步则存在显著降低工业行业劳动份额的效应,这与我国工业部门在研究期内的技术进步具有劳动节约型特征有关。