Where is place in the history of work? Worksites, workspaces, and the home-work nexus

Economic History and Business History: Mutual Contributions and Future Prospects

What Can Regulators Regulate? The Case of Electricity

Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations: VIII. Distribution of Income by Size

THESE statements represent the divergent views held on licensing. Practitioners of licensed occupations usually support licensing on the ground that it is in the public interest; many economists, on the other hand, feel that such licensing is designed to give monopoly power to members of the occupation. Which view is correct? What is the evidence? A survey of occupations and businesses regulated and the requirements for entry imposed indicates that the least restrictive types of regulations were imposed for the public welfare while the most restrictive types appear to have been established to benefit practitioners of the regulated occupations and businesses. A closer examination of those occupations most restrictively regulated, such as law, medicine, barbering, etc., however, indicates that a belief that society knows the future better than the individual has been responsible for licensing. The idea that the individual knows what is best for himself has given way before the concept that it is society which can best judge. Table 1 presents a survey of the types of regulations that pertained to residents of Chicago on January 1, 1960. The table divides them into those regulations administered by the city and those administered by the state; it further divides them into those pertaining to occupations and those pertaining to types of businesses. The regulations themselves have been categorized by the severity or restrictiveness of the regulations. For each category of regulations the percentage of occupations or businesses which must meet certain requirements is given. Some requirements seem to have been established in the public's interest while others have a tenuous connection, if any, with the welfare of consumers. Interpretation of which regula-

The Lighthouse in Economics

E CONOMISTS have expended enormous effort examining the rationale for various contractual arrangements in agriculture, particularly sharecropping. While economists have made considerable theoretical efforts to understand agricultural contracts, few empirical studies have been undertaken. The dearth of empirical analyses of agricultural contracts is particularly striking for modern Western agriculture.' This is an important omission, not only because the existing empirical work tends to focus on the question of efficiency, but also because the theoretical models tend to examine contracts that bear little resemblance to those found in the United States today.

A bank is the prototypical financial institution; there are notable outward differences between the wealth invested by owners of financial institutions and that of other industries. The capital of a financial institution consists largely of financial assets and only to a small degree of the physical plant and equipment usually associated with capital in other industries. Moreover, these physical differences are associated with important functional differences. A financial institution, like any other firm, faces the problem of combining the inputs which it purchases to produce the outputs which it sells. In banking, the most important inputs are labor and deposits, and they produce liquidity services, brokerage services, accounting and information services, and the like. In this production process, bank capital has two roles: (1) It cooperates directly with the other inputs in the production of bank services, and (2) it is used to attract the deposit input by providing insurance to depositors against a decline in the value of a bank's assets; the more capital a bank has, the more the value of its assets can fall before depositors incur losses. The difference between banking (and financial institutions in general) and most other industries is in the relative importance of these two roles. The equity capital of any firm serves, in part, to guarantee the value of the firm's fixed obligations, but that function is usually subordinate to the provision of assets to the firm. However, in banking, equity capital (and equity is the form that almost all nondeposit ownership interest in bank assets has taken) typically accounts for only about a tenth of total bank resources, and most of the returns to equity capital derive from its insurance function. Bank owners invest capital primarily to attract deposits, which are then used to buy assets, and only secondarily to buy assets directly. Apart from these novel economic aspects, a study of investment in banking provides the opportunity to study the effects of government

The Costs and Returns of Human Migration

Racial Discrimination and Trade Unionism

The main focus of this study is on understanding the importance of social dynamics of cities for attracting human capital to urban regions. The principal research question of the article is “if there is a spatial dependency on neighbouring provinces’ social environmental qualities in human capital at­traction for Turkey.” It is believed that developmental disparities among regions can be overcome with a balanced distribution of human capital. In this article, first the concept and importance of human capital and its evolution throughout economic history are explained in order to emphasize the relationship between development and human capital for urban regions. The literature review consists of migration models developed and used in previous studies and recent literature that together consider human capital and its flow with spatial analysis. A review of migration models helps structure the quantitative models’ building blocks, or the concepts to be quantified. Literature that discusses human capital and spatial analysis, at the same time, guides the study in implementing the most appropriate analysis technique. The literature discussed in the paper is focused on human capital migration and urban attractiveness. Its similarity with the current study work is the focus on the relationship between urban environment components and human capital. However, the cited studies lack the “spatial/relational” approach to urban regions which means that the effects of developments in settlements neighbouring the region were ignored. The contribution which we intend to make with the current study is to adapt the spatial econometric analysis to the problem of human capital attraction. Literature review is followed by data used in the empirical part of the study, and brief information on spatial econometric analysis. Next, findings of the empirical spatial econometric analysis of Turkey’s 81 urban regions are provided. Overall, the analysis indicated that undergraduate and post-graduate migrants care about the social prosperity of the neighbouring environment of destination province. The last part concludes with an interpretation of empirical study findings and discusses relevant urban and regional policy instruments.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

H r ISTORIOGRAPHY in Hungary can look back on a distinguished past. It had inherited relatively rich but unevenly exploited sources from predecessors and a relatively ample but disproportionately worked-out literature which was predominantly conservative in its attitude and methods. Economic history, however, was a particularly weak branch of Hungarian historiography. Research in economic history was pioneered at the turn of the century by Kairoly Tagainyi with his ephemeral Magyar Gazdasagtertineti Szemle (Hungarian Economic History Review, i894-i906) and was continued by Prof. S. Domanovszky's school in the inter-war period. These developments did not fundamentally influence Hungarian historiography, which was characterized by a predominant interest in political history. The introduction of Marxist methods was the responsibility of Erik Molnar, whose works on the development of medieval Hungarian society played an important part in recent Hungarian historiography. Economic history has had its greatest quantitative and qualitative growth in the past twenty-five years. This growth derived much from the materialist concept of history, from the recognition that over and above geographical and biological factors, the mode of production, consumption, and distribution provides that tongue dure'e element (to use the language of the Annales school), that process which forms a basis for cycles and epochal changes which underlie histoire evenementionnelle. Besides the impulse received from Marxism the upward trend of economic history was reinforced after I 945 by the opening of the archives of the state, of ministries, of enterprises, and of the families, sources that had been closed up to that time. Hungarian historians also learned much from foreign literature, from works applying modern economic methods to history, and from discussions at international meetings. They contributed to the growing international co-operation of economic historians at the International Congresses of Economic History held in I 960, I 962, I965, I968, and I 970. The results of increasing research, and the enlarging international relations, are indicated by the organizing of conferences on economic history in Budapest (French-Hungarian, March i968; G.D.R.Hungarian, September i969; Italian-Hungarian, January I970). The research work of Hungarian historians has been focused on the following themes: the formation and consolidation of the feudal relations of property; the problems of the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the characteristics of the capitalist system in Hungary; the question of the industrial revolution in eastern central Europe; investigations on demography and social structure. This research has resulted in new trends in historical writing that have developed in Hungary in the course of the past twenty-five years.

The study is an attempt to explain why Public Relations strategy is an effective avenue to tackle electoral malfeasance in Nigeria. The Nigerian Presidential Campaign of 2015 election with specific reference to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate presented a ready case study for an analysis. The paper is a public relations analysis aimed at identifying public relations strategy adopted by the PDP’s presidential campaign team and evaluate success and failure including factors responsible for it in the 2015 election. The conceptual framework adopted is SWOT analysis which forms the background for the public relations strategy and method adopted is Analysis, i.e. in-depth study of the Public Relations Strategy. The paper identified that PDP relied on SWOT analysis model instead of detailed social scientific empirical research. The PDP presidential campaign failure arose from over-reliance on strengths and opportunities which resulted to a bunker mentality and dependence on electoral malfeasance. The paper recommends that politicians and political parties rely on experts in social scientific empirical research to direct campaign public relations strategy to avoid reliance on electoral malfeasance among others. The paper demonstrates the weakness and problems arising from sole dependence on SWOT analysis. It is a subjective and depends on individual interpretation. It highlights the need for Nigerian politicians and political parties to rely more on social scientific empirical research to direct public relations strategy in electoral campaign. This paper demonstrates the need for a social scientific research, electoral campaign driven to combat electoral malfeasance in Nigeria.

In the early 1970s the proportion of the nonagricultural labor force self-employed in the United States ceased its downward trend and has been rising ever since. This study provides an analysis of the causes of this change. A general-equilibrium model of self- employment and wage employment is analyzed, and aggregate U.S. time- series data are used to test predictions derived from the model. The empirical analysis indicates that changes in technology, industrial structure, tax rates, and social-security retirement benefits have contributed to the reversal of the previous downward trend, which had persisted for over a century. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

Ewa Domańska, a distinguished historian of historiography and the methodologist of history, has provided an insightful commentary on the state of humanities and social sciences. The development of interdisciplinary research in social sciences and humanities has resulted in varying outcomes and interpenetrations. Interdisciplinary research helps the development of science. However, studies undertaken with less rigor may pose some threats into the long term. According to Domańska, the lack of qualifications and care (especially with respect to theory and methodology) may undermine the autonomy of a disciplines and the credibility of research in the given field. This timely warning prompted the author to create the project with the aim to assert the independence of the threatened disciplines and to “re-professionalize” these areas of study. This is to be achieved by emphasizing the role of theory in science—a strong embeddedness of a discipline in the theory. Domańska’s concept, in the form of a dichotomous project, seems to be a recipe for achieving this goal. It presupposes, on the one hand, a “practical methodology”, i.e. constructing the theory basing on empirical research material, and on the other hand the so-called “virtue epistemology”, which stresses an ethical aspect of the researcher’s attitude and labour. The aim of the paper is to discuss Domańska’s project and to draw attention to the originality of her concept in the context of economic and social sciences. The economic history is a peculiar discipline founded at the intersection of history and economics. Thus, it is possible to put forward the thesis that Domańska’s suggestions are relevant to the research of economic history. The author will seek to determine what cognitive opportunities arise from the ontology of economic history and their potential threats to the main disciplines of history and economics. The article will also examine if Domańska’s project is appropriate for the economic history research as it is deeply embedded in “practical methodology”, and so in theory. Next, the author aims to consider the role of new theoretical approaches in this field, and whether it is possible to formulate novel concepts within the scope of the economic history. Finally, the author will attempt to assess the significance of “virtue epistemology” or the ethical aspect of an economic historian’s work.