post-WWII Period Research Articles

Making Males Aggressive and Females Coy: Gender across the Animal-Human Boundary

Sexual selection, as conceived by Charles Darwin, explained the origins of phenomena in the animal kingdom that could not be attributed to natural selection—why males and females differed in their appearance and behavior and the presence of beauty. Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century, few biologists found Darwin’s proposed mechanism of female mate choice plausible, as they rejected the idea that animals possessed the capacity to aesthetically evaluate and choose a mate. Animals in the early twentieth century instead functioned as mechanical foils against which zoologists sought to define what it was to be human. After World War II, however, animals as social beings became sources for understanding our human instincts. Men were quickly bestialized because of their association with aggressive, warlike behavior, whereas women were exempted from such degenerate stereotypes. Yet, less than a decade later, biological anthropologists and zoologists began to frame female animals as equally manipulative, albeit by acting sexually coy and exercising their natural prerogative—female mate choice. Aggressive males and coy females were active constructions of the post-WWII period, not passive importations from Darwin’s theory of sexual selection over a century earlier. This article interweaves two polarities, animal and human, male and female, to elucidate the evolution of biological constructions of animality and gender throughout the twentieth century.

Research in Vocational Education and Training

In this article, the author examines research into vocational education and training (VET) in the UK throughout the 60 years of the post-WWII period, with a particular focus on more recent decades. He notes the effect of the rising political, social and economic priority of VET during this period on research activity. Another development identified is the interdisciplinarity of VET research beyond the boundaries of educational studies, drawing on aspects of sociology, economics, philosophy, history and comparative education. Particularly significant developments have been: an attempt to understand the shortcomings of VET in the UK; extended comparisons with different VET systems across large parts of the world; detailed studies of how different occupations are pursued and their underlying relationship with VET; and studies dealing with how to make VET a more attractive career option for young people.

Cities, Redistribution, and Authoritarian Regime Survival

How does redistributive policy affect the survival of authoritarian regimes? I argue that redistributive policy in favor of cities, while temporarily reducing urban grievances, in the long-run undermines regime survival by inducing urban concentration. I test the argument using cross-national city population, urban bias, and nondemocratic regime survival data in the post-WWII period. The results show that urban concentration is dangerous for dictators principally by promoting collective action, that urban bias induces urban concentration, and that urban bias represents a Faustian bargain with short-term benefits overwhelmed by long-term costs.

Sales, Inventories, and Real Interest Rates: A Century of Stylized Facts

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters structural VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in both the reduced-form and the structural correlations between business inventories and either sales growth or the real interest rate in the United States during both the interwar and the post-WWII periods. We identify four structural shocks by combining a single long-run restriction to identify a permanent output shock as in Blanchard and Quah (1989), with three sign restrictions to identify demand- and supply-side transitory shocks. We produce several new stylized facts which should inform the development of new models of inventories. In particular, we show that (i) during both the interwar and the post-WWII periods, the structural correlation between inventories and the real interest rate conditional on identified interest rate shocks is systematically positive; (ii) the reduced-form correlation between the two series is positive during the post-WWII period, but in line with the predictions of theory it is robustly negative during the interwar era; and (iii) during the interwar era, the correlations between inventories and either of the two other series exhibits a remarkably strong co-movement with output at the business-cycle frequencies.

Sales, Inventories, and Real Interest Rates: A Century of Stylized Facts

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters structural VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in both the reduced-form and the structural correlations between business inventories and either sales growth or the real interest rate in the United States during both the interwar and the post-WWII periods. We identify four structural shocks by combining a single long-run restriction to identify a permanent output shock as in Blanchard and Quah (1989), with three sign restrictions to identify demand- and supply-side transitory shocks. We produce several new stylized facts which should inform the development of new models of inventories. In particular, we show that (i) during both the interwar and the post-WWII periods, the structural correlation between inventories and the real interest rate conditional on identified interest rate shocks is systematically positive; (ii) the reduced-form correlation between the two series is positive during the post-WWII period, but in line with the predictions of theory it is robustly negative during the interwar era; and (iii) during the interwar era, the correlations between inventories and either of the two other series exhibits a remarkably strong co-movement with output at the business-cycle frequencies.

To Flood the Basin with Beethoven

This article focuses on the specific aesthetic formation resulting after the reorganization of the FM segment of the electromagnetic spectrum in the American post-WWII period of the late 1940s and 1950s. FM's distinction in this period was as an emergent alternative space that promoted itself with a rhetoric that emphasized the medium as a more democratic, less commercial mode of communication and musical exhibition. This article looks at a combination of programming guides, trade press and general press sources to understand how this rhetoric manifested itself through programming, ownership, FM audiences and their aesthetic expectations that influenced the development of the much heralded American FM freeform radio formats throughout the 1960s and 1970s

Historical Patterns and Dynamics of Public Debt—Evidence From a New Database

This paper introduces the first truly comprehensive database on gross government-debt-to-GDP ratios, covering nearly the entire IMF membership (178 countries) and spanning an exceptionally long time period (going back to 1880 for most advanced and some emerging economies). The paper then uses the database to document the evolution of public debt ratios in advanced, emerging, and low-income economies, and relate them to contemporaneous developments in growth, commodity prices, and debt relief, respectively. Finally, the paper identifies 129 large debt increases and decreases observed in 19 advanced economies over 1880–2007 and decomposes them into contributions from the primary balance, the interest-growth differential, and the stock-flow adjustment term (a composite of valuation effects and “below-the-line” fiscal operations). The analysis suggests a pattern of asymmetric contributions: the primary balance plays a key role in debt reductions, except during the post-WWII period (when the growth-interest differential was extremely favorable); while debt surges were often associated with large stock-flow adjustments, likely reflecting assumption of implicit liabilities and exchange rate changes and, for the cases of debt reduction, debt default.

Urban Concentration, Redistribution, and Authoritarian Resilience

How does redistributive policy affect the survival of authoritarian regimes? I argue that redistributive policy in favor of cities, while a temporary measure reducing urban grievances, in the long-run undermines regime survival by inducing urban concentration. I test the argument using cross-national city population, urban bias, and non-democratic regime survival data in the post-WWII period. The results show that urban concentration is dangerous for dictators principally by promoting collective action, that urban bias induces urban concentration, and that urban bias represents a Faustian bargain with short-term benefits overwhelmed by long-term costs.

Testing Public Debt Sustainability Using the Present-Value Model

The recent fiscal crisis has renewed the public policy focus on debt sustainability. To investigate debt sustainability empirically, a significant portion of the literature on public debt sustainability tests whether government revenue and expenditure are cointegrated, i.e., move together in the long-run. In this paper, we show that this approach is not conclusive when the null of cointegration is not rejected. In such a case, one cannot draw definitive conclusions about the sustainability of public debt. To overcome this problem, we propose a new approach based on Campbell and Shiller's (1987) present-value model to derive moment restrictions that can be used to test fiscal sustainability consistently. Using this new approach, we test the solvency of the U.S. fiscal situation for the post-WWII data. Our findings suggest that the U.S. fiscal situation has not been sustainable for the post-WWII period. This result is in contrast to the traditional approach where we find that the sustainability hypothesis is not rejected.

Read All about It!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?

Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic activity. They are positively linked to changes in R&D and scientific knowledge, and capture the new technologies' commercialization dates. Changes in information technology are found to be important sources of economic fluctuations in the post-WWII period, and total factor productivity, investment, and, to a lesser extent, labor are all shown to increase following a positive technology shock. (JEL E22, E23, E32, O33, O34, O47)

Have Cyclical Movements in the Unemployment Rate Become More Persistent?

I examine whether the cyclical behavior of unemployment has changed over the post WWII period. Specifically, I test whether cyclical movements in unemployment have become more persistent. Finding that they have, indeed, become more persistent, I then take some initial steps in explaining why. I find that the increase in persistence has affected private nonfarm payroll employment as well as unemployment and that increased persistence appears to be widespread across industries. At the same time, increased persistence owes primarily to greater persistence in job finding rates and greater persistence in unemployment among permanent job losers. This combination suggests that the welfare loss from cyclical increases in unemployment is becoming increasingly concentrated among permanent job losers who become unemployed for extended durations during cyclical downturns.

The futile quest for a grand explanation of long-run government expenditure

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner's Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United Kingdom. Hence, in contrast to previous studies, we evaluate the validity of Wagner's Law and the ratchet effect hypothesis over a very long time period, starting at the beginning of industrialization. Cointegration analysis is used to investigate the long-run relationships between government expenditure and GDP, focusing on sub-periods and structural breaks. Moreover, we test the ratchet effect hypothesis by estimating models which allow for asymmetric adjustment. According to our main results, Wagner's Law does not hold in the long run, although the data are consistent with Wagner's Law between roughly 1860 and the mid 1970s. This can be traced to the formation of the modern public sector, including the introduction of public education, health care, and so forth. Yet Wagner's Law did not hold during the initial industrialization phase (before 1860), and in recent periods GDP only affects the government spending share when we control for population age structure. Finally, we find some evidence of asymmetric adjustment in the UK, particularly in the post-WWII period. However, the ratchet effect is not a general cause of the growth of government spending.

Have Cyclical Movements in the Unemployment Rate Become More Persistent?

I examine whether the cyclical behavior of unemployment has changed over the post WWII period. Specifically, I test whether cyclical movements in unemployment have become more persistent. Finding that they have, indeed, become more persistent, I then take some initial steps in explaining why. I find that the increase in persistence has affected private nonfarm payroll employment as well as unemployment and that increased persistence appears to be widespread across industries. At the same time, increased persistence owes primarily to greater persistence in job finding rates and greater persistence in unemployment among permanent job losers. This combination suggests that the welfare loss from cyclical increases in unemployment is becoming increasingly concentrated among permanent job losers who become unemployed for extended durations during cyclical downturns.

Civil War Contagion and Neighboring Interventions1

Extant models of civil war intervention have difficulty accounting for the intervention decisions of third-party states that share a border with an ongoing civil war. This is troubling, as contiguous third parties account for a large proportion of interventions. I demonstrate that the tendency of civil wars to spread geographically pose neighbor states with threats to their well-being that are faced by no other type of intervener in the international system. Destruction, regime stability, even state survival are threatened by the prospect of civil war infection. I argue that neighboring third parties are thus motivated to intervene in an attempt to thwart war diffusion across their own borders. Through an analysis of civil war prevalence, I generate a measure of each state's yearly likelihood of being infected by a proximate civil war's hostilities. I then use this measure to explain neighboring interventions in civil wars of the post-WWII period. The results support my theorized expectations.

Geographers and the theory and practice of return fieldwork

Fieldwork, especially in lands, is one of the time-honored hallmarks of professional geography, yet as Felix Driver (2000, p. 267) and others have noted, little attention has been paid to the specifically geographical dimensions of field-work [sic] or to its history within the discipline. In this article I will explore pieces of this history through the practice of return visitation to particular places, with an emphasis on the record of North American geographers' engagement with Latin America. In turn, Carl Sauer's Mexican research, together with that of some of his students and others inspired by his example, appears to be the most tightly woven net of repeat visitation. Here, one finds multiple strands of crisscrossing lines of reconnaissance and research, and complicated proxy relations involving individuals from later generations pursuing topics initiated by individuals from earlier ones. Space here does not permit more than sketching the outlines of this history, but it does illustrate some of the salient aspects of repeat visitation, and points to a neglected topic in the history of geography. Viewed from the broad perspective of geography's historical record, the practice of return or repeat visits appears to be a more recent development than a time-honored tradition. Various factors can be proposed as contributing to this apparent trend toward repetition. Perhaps the foremost is geography's shift from a spatial-descriptive exploratory enterprise to a modern discipline with a premium placed on deriving generalizations through replicable results. Although few of the human geographers in the past century engaging in foreign area research have been self-conscious devotees of approaches involving nomothetic, spatial analytical science, the ascendancy of a scientific human geography in the post-WWII period can be implicated in the decline of chorology and geographic description for its own sake. A second impetus also might be seen as more influence from outside geography than from within. Along with the rise of a more analytic, scientific human geography, geographers began to interact more with other social scientists, and borrow from their theory and practice. For field-oriented geographers working abroad, especially cultural geographers, the paths most often crossed or followed were anthropological. Increasingly archaeologists and ethnologists were digging in and making long investments in discrete study sites, rather than mounting wide-ranging surveys and broad collecting ventures. A variant of this development, especially for geographers, is repeat visit research at intervals to measure change (or lack of it) in places, landscapes, or regions (Vale and Vale 1983; Works and Hadley 2000; Walker and Leib 2002; McSweeny 2008; Brady 2009). Elements of the mobility and transience of the older survey and collection mode is carried forward, but with an emphasis on demonstrating familiarity rather than novelty. A fourth influence that began to emerge by the 1960s and was accelerated by that decade's ferment, involved ethical questions and issues. Anthropologists, followed by other social scientists including geographers, generally came to see and accept that not only their research had varying impacts on their subjects, but also that forms of reciprocity might be part of a researcher's protocol and practice. Among other modes, this has taken the form of extended ties to individuals or communities, often spanning decades since the initial research was conducted (Richardson 1998). In varying degrees, all of these underlying factors may play a part in the decisions and the designs that have led geographers to return at intervals, often multiple times, to favored sites, landscapes, or regions. I suspect, however, that most returnees would simply say that the main rationale or attraction is that they have come to identify strongly with their adopted site or region and feel a need or obligation to return. …

International comovements, business cycle and inflation: A historical perspective

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional comovements, however, has increased significantly. Second, the share of inflation variation due to a global factor has become larger since 1985. Third, over most of the post-WWII period, international comovements within regions have accounted for the bulk of fluctuations in business cycle and inflation. Fourth, prices have become significantly less countercyclical during the post-1984 sample, with the largest contribution due to external developments.

Walter Reuther, the UAW, and the dilemmas of automation

Historians have slighted the importance of automation both as a cause of organized labor's decline in America and as a lively issue among labor leaders in the early post-WWII period. In part, this disregard stems from labor's own ambivalence about technological change. This essay considers that ambivalence by looking at Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers. Reuther and his colleagues shared widespread hopes that the new production processes would relieve the burdens of assembly-line work and increase the working class's access to cultivated leisure. At the same time, however, they recognized that unchecked technological change would generate a wave of structural unemployment by displacing experienced workers while denying new, unskilled workers necessary jobs. Reuther and his colleagues feared that automation in this form would destroy the consumer capacity that the working class had so recently acquired, and in so doing would undermine the health of the entire economy. Reuther's strategy, therefore, was not to resist automation but to manage its implementation through both collective bargaining and progressive political victories.

Time-Varying Inflation Expectations and Economic Fluctuations in the United Kingdom: A Structural VAR Analysis

This paper examines how the interaction between inflation expectations and nominal and real macroeconomic variables has evolved for the United Kingdom over the post-WWII period until 2007. We model time-variation through a Markov-switching structural vector autoregressive framework with variants of the sign restriction identification scheme to back out the time-varying effect of different structural shocks. We investigate the following questions: (i) How has the impact of the mix of real and nominal shocks on the UK economy evolved over time and did this have a specific impact on UK inflation expectations? and (ii) Has there been an autonomous impact of inflation expectations on the UK economy and has it changed over time? Our results suggest that shocks to inflation expectations had important effects on actual inflation in the 1970s, but this impact had significantly declined towards the end of our sample. This seems to be mainly due to a relatively slower response of monetary policy to these shocks in the 1970s compared to later years. Similarly, oil price shocks and real demand shocks led to important changes in macroeconomic variables in the 1970s. Beyond that period and up to the end of our sample oil price shocks became less significant for the dynamics of actual inflation and output growth. However real demand shocks became a relatively more important determinant for fluctuations in those series during the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. The changing response of monetary policy to this type of shock appears to be crucial for this result.

Regulating Multilingualism in the North Calotte: The Case of Kven, Meänkieli and Sámi Languages

This article examines the dynamics of language relations by investigating the historical, political and ideological processes at play in the minoritization and revitalization of Kven, Meänkieli and Sámi languages in the North Calotte region. We focus particularly on language political and legal instruments developed and used to alter and regulate language relations in this area, and aim at providing a state-of-the-art overview of this quickly changing landscape. When looking at the minoritized languages in this region, we can see that developments in their status are linked to the creation of modernist nation states and their borders. More recent processes are related to new global cooperation and international policy efforts, resulting in the present synchronic variation. When reflecting on the considerable changes in both international and national language policies all the way from the beginning of the post-WWII period to the strengthening of pluralism in the 1970s to today, we can see that at least some of the minority languages of the North find themselves in a considerably better societal situation than ever before. At the same time, however, multilingual practices in the form of modern communication technologies, world-wide youth culture, international migration and tourism, intertwined with language revitalization efforts, make the terrain even more complex and varied.

The Futile Quest for a Grand Explanation of Long-Run Government Expenditure

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner’s Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United Kingdom. Hence, in contrast to previous studies, we evaluate the validity of Wagner’s Law and the ratchet effect hypothesis over a very long time period, starting at the beginning of industrialization. Cointegration analysis is used to investigate the long-run relationships between government expenditure and GDP, focusing on sub-periods and parameter stability. Moreover, we test the ratchet effect hypothesis by estimating models which allow for asymmetric adjustment. According to our main results, Wagner’s Law does not hold in the long run, although the data are consistent with Wagner’s Law between roughly 1860 and the late 1960s in Sweden, and the 1970s in the UK. This can be traced to the formation of the modern public sector, including the introduction of public education, health care, and so forth. Yet Wagner’s Law did not hold during the initial industrialization phase (before 1860), or during recent periods. Finally, we find some evidence of asymmetric adjustment, particularly in the post WWII period in the UK: Public expenditure grows more during bad times than it decreases during good times. However, the ratchet effect is only a short to medium-term phenomenon.