Worth,age, and social status in early modern England1

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of ‘worth’ provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid‐sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre‐industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups.     

Tesla电动车：冒险家的疯狂梦想

去年年初，Tesla汽车公司首席执行官ElonMusk身着贴身牛仔裤、皮靴和夹克，在电子音乐声中揭开一块黑色幕布，展示给世人一辆炫光四射的银色汽车：ModelS电动车原型。Musk对着—群客户、记者和名流宣称：“这是最具历史意义的汽车。”ModelS电动车外表时尚，启动噪音宛如耳语。这对于那些腰缠万贯的富豪们，真是太具诱惑力了。     

Laissez-Faire for LIFFE

The development of futures markets offers the prospect of increasing stabilisation in commodity prices. But government taxation policy has failed to take account of changes required to encourage individual as well as coroorate participation in these markets. The new Chancellor should introduce legislation to allow speculators to write off losses against profits.     

Cambridge and Its Revolution: A Perspective on the Multiplier and Effective Demand*

The tendency of various scholarship has been so to interpret Kahn's multiplier article as to invite wonder that Keynes did not break through earlier to his consumption function and effective demand. And while Keynes was independently along this road it is difficult to believe that Jens Warming, deploying a personal propensity to save within the investment multiplier mechanism, did not help him to arrive. Ironically Kahn, who resisted Warming's innovation, did incidentally point the way to a formulation of the effective demand problem which was alternative to that of Keynes.     

WHO GETS MATERNITY LEAVE?: THE CASE OF MALAYSIA

This paper evaluates a maternity leave policy designed to reduce gender inequality in the labor market. It examines the extent to which Malaysia's paid maternity leave policy provides working women with leave as a condition of their employment. Since all women are not the same, a policy may benefit some women and not others. Using data from the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey, the paper estimates the likelihood of a woman's receiving maternity leave as a function of demographic, employment, and occupational variables. The results show that being Indian, having higher education, holding jobs that are full-time and all-year, holding jobs with higher earnings at the start, and holding professional and clerical occupations increase the likelihood that a woman will receive maternity leave. These results imply that Malaysia's maternity leave policy does not provide broad coverage to working women—that is, only some women under some conditions in some occupations tend to receive leave. The evidence suggests that women in the primary sector of the labor market receive leave while women in the secondary sector do not.     

The Propagation of Keynesian Thinking in Australia: E. R. Walker 1933-36*

Walker attended Cambridge in the early 1930s when Keynes was moving toward an expenditure-oriented explanation of output and employment but had yet to break through to his theory of effective demand. In conveying this thinking to an Australian audience through 1933-35, and in setting up as a Keynesian critic of depression policy, Walker raised the level of local discourse upon the unemployment problem. In 1936, too, he was quick to novelty in the General Theory; but now others were to carry forward the intellectual revolution that was consummated in war and post-war planning.     

THE LABOUR FORCE DYNAMICS OF THE MARGINALLY ATTACHED*

One of the most important measures of the state of the labour market is the unemployment rate. However, the standard definition of unemployment ignores an important group of people who are not employed but who want to work – the marginally attached workforce. The marginally attached are defined as those who are not employed, want to work but are not actively seeking work and therefore not classified as unemployed. The paper uses longitudinal data from the Survey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns (SEUP) to test whether the marginally attached are behaviourally distinct from the unemployed or those who are not attached to the labour force. We find that the labour force transitions of the marginally attached, on the whole, are between those of the unemployed and the unattached. Another finding is that the length of time over which the labour market dynamics are considered is crucial to our understanding of the labour market dynamics of the marginally attached. An implication of the findings of this paper is that a range of measures of potential labour supply should be considered, and that the measure used should depend on the specific question being asked.