A J Field
Biographic Data
| ID | 157774 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A J Field |
| GIVEN NAMES | A J |
| FAMILY NAME | Field |
| SIGNATURE | FIELD A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Santa Clara University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4864-5388 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1957 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Roundtable Review
In 2023, Princeton University Press published Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. It is a book of comparable mass to Alfred Chandler’s 1977 The Visible Hand and equally ambitious. 1 The erudition is vast. (The bibliography alone runs 78 closely-printed pages. There are 122 pages of equally closely-printed footnotes to the 522-page main text whose own font is not large.) A prod…
The economic consequences of U.S. mobilization for the Second World War: Reflections on the symposium
The central arguments of my book are first, that contrary to conventional wisdom, productivity in U.S. manufacturing declined during the Second World War, and second, that little of the learning associated with producing military durables had lasting supply-side benefits.The main reason productivity declined was that the war forced sudden, radical, and ultimately temporary changes in the product mix.The main reason the benefits of learning failed…
The World War II US Rubber Famine
By April 1942, Japan had cut off almost all US supplies of natural rubber, a key raw material for which the country had effectively no domestic sourcing. The resulting shortage aggravated downward pressure on manufacturing productivity and seriously jeopardized military capability. The risks that this would happen, widely foreseen, could have been mitigated by more or earlier stockpiling, subsidization of domestic plant-based sources of latex, or…
The decline of US manufacturing productivity between 1941 and 1948
The view that war benefits potential output has been influential in treatments of US mobilization for the Second World War, where it has been largely premised on the benefits of learning by doing in producing military durables. If the thesis that war benefits aggregate supply is correct, it is indeed within manufacturing that we should most likely see its effects. Total factor productivity within the sector in fact fell at a rate of −1.4 per cent…
Mark Hendrickson. American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression
Mark Hendrickson’s American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression studies the response of American social scientists and government policy makers to labor problems during the 1920s. Had labor shared, would labor share, indeed should labor share in the growth of per capita output made possible by increases in labor productivity? A related question: were wage bargains strictly private contracts, or …
Schelling, von Neumann, and the Event that Didn’t Occur
Thomas Schelling was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee as a pioneer in the application of game theory and rational choice analysis to problems of politics and international relations. One of his principal concerns was how a country could engage in successful deterrence. If the behavioral assumptions that commonly underpin game theory are taken seriously and applied consistently, however, nuclear adversaries are almost certain to engage in d…
Capital in the Twenty-First Century: A Review Essay
In the title of his 1968 review of early research in Cliometrics, Lance Davis opined that “it will never be literature.” One of Thomas Piketty's many achievements in Capital in the Twenty-First Century is to prove Davis wrong. Piketty's book is both an exemplary work in quantitative economic history and economic literature in the finest sense, written with the Cartesian clarity we associate with the French scientific tradition. It is, moreover, q…
America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War
Journal Article America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War Get access America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. By Hugh Rockoff. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 357 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $26.99.) Alexander J. Field Alexander J. Field Santa Clara UniversitySanta Clara, California [email protected]…
The Procyclical Behavior of Total Factor Productivity in the United States, 1890-2004
Between 1890 and 2004 total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the United States has been strongly procyclical, while labor productivity growth has been mildly so. This article argues that these results are not simply a statistical artifact, as Mathew Shapiro and others have argued. Procyclicality resulted principally from demand shocks interacting with capital services which are relatively invariant over the cycle. This account contrasts with e…
The impact of the Second World War on US productivity growth1
This paper considers the productivity impact on the US economy of the period of war mobilization and demobilization lasting from 1941 to 1948. Optimists have pointed to learning by doing in military production and spin-offs from military R & D as the basis for asserting a substantial positive effect of military conflict on potential output. Productivity data for the private non-farm economy are not consistent with this view, as they show slower t…
The origins of US total factor productivity growth in the golden age
The equipment hypothesis and US economic growth
Technological Change and U.S. Productivity Growth in the Interwar Years
Manufacturing contributed almost all—83 percent—of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48 percent of PNE TFP growth. Yet the overall growth of the residual between 1929 and 1941 was the highest of any comparable period in the twentieth century. This resulted fro…
Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitiv…
Altruistically Inclined: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitiv…
French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration
Au XIX e siecle, le telegraphe et les chemins de fer ont ete un remarquable progres technologique, l'un apportant des informations, l'autre des marchandises. L'A. decrit la telegraphie optique en France, en analysant les proprietes de transmission des messages
Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939
Uncontrolled Land Development and the Duration of the Depression in the United States
Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continu…
The Magnetic Telegraph, Price and Quantity Data, and the New Management of Capital
The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital-savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control
Do legal systems matter
Economic History and the Modern Economist: Let Us Now Praise Exogenous Variables: A Review Essay on Economic History and the Modern Economist
Economic History and the Modern Economist, edited by William N. Parker, reprints with light revision a set of four papers delivered at the 1984 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings in Dallas. The set was subsequently published in the May 1985 American Economic Review, along with the comments of the original discussants, Don McCloskey and Gavin Wright, a foreword and afterword by Parker, a comment by Charles Kindleberger, who organized the…
The Future of Economic History
Modern Business Enterprise as a Capital-Saving Innovation
The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth-…
Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism. I: Europe and the World Economy
On the unimportance of machinery
Microeconomics, Norms, and Rationality
The problem with neoclassical institutional economics: A critique with special reference to the North/Thomas model of pre-1500 Europe
Uncontrolled Land Development and the Duration of the Depression in the United States
Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continu…
On the unimportance of machinery
Sectoral shift in antebellum Massachusetts: A reconsideration
Land Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century American and British Technology
Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these propositions, and explores their interrelationships through the use of a linear model inspired by the writings of David Ricardo
The impact of the Second World War on US productivity growth1
This paper considers the productivity impact on the US economy of the period of war mobilization and demobilization lasting from 1941 to 1948. Optimists have pointed to learning by doing in military production and spin-offs from military R & D as the basis for asserting a substantial positive effect of military conflict on potential output. Productivity data for the private non-farm economy are not consistent with this view, as they show slower t…
Technological Change and U.S. Productivity Growth in the Interwar Years
Manufacturing contributed almost all—83 percent—of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48 percent of PNE TFP growth. Yet the overall growth of the residual between 1929 and 1941 was the highest of any comparable period in the twentieth century. This resulted fro…
A New Interpretation of the Onset of the Great Depression
Over the 1919–1929 period, fluctuations in the value of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange exercised statistically significant and economically important impacts on the demand to hold cash balances. The marked post–1925 rise in the volume and value of stock trading led to a measurable increase in the transactions demand to hold cash balances, an increase in demand not recognized or seriously discussed by individuals inside or outside of…
Economic and Demographic Determinants of Educational Commitment: Massachusetts, 1855
More than half the variance in length of school session in a cross section of 329 localities in Massachusetts in 1855 can be explained by the share of Irish in.the town's population, the family per dwelling ratio, and a proxy for the share of male merchants over 15 in the population, all of which enter regression equations with strong positive coefficients. This paper considers what these results may tell us about a number of hypotheses that link…
Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitiv…
Modern Business Enterprise as a Capital-Saving Innovation
The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth-…
America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War
Journal Article America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War Get access America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. By Hugh Rockoff. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 357 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $26.99.) Alexander J. Field Alexander J. Field Santa Clara UniversitySanta Clara, California [email protected]…
The equipment hypothesis and US economic growth
Educational Reform and Manufacturing Development in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
This dissertation attempts the following: first, to outline and document the precise dimensions of the historical coincidence between the rise of the factory system and the development of mass public schooling ln mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts; second, to set forth hypotheses explaining and relating these two developments; and finally, to evaluate these various propositions through the analysis of documentary: and statistical materials. Dur…
The Magnetic Telegraph, Price and Quantity Data, and the New Management of Capital
The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital-savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control
The Procyclical Behavior of Total Factor Productivity in the United States, 1890-2004
Between 1890 and 2004 total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the United States has been strongly procyclical, while labor productivity growth has been mildly so. This article argues that these results are not simply a statistical artifact, as Mathew Shapiro and others have argued. Procyclicality resulted principally from demand shocks interacting with capital services which are relatively invariant over the cycle. This account contrasts with e…
French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration
Au XIX e siecle, le telegraphe et les chemins de fer ont ete un remarquable progres technologique, l'un apportant des informations, l'autre des marchandises. L'A. decrit la telegraphie optique en France, en analysant les proprietes de transmission des messages
Education and Social Programs
Research workshops offer an opportunity for both prospective and retrospective examinations of work in a particular area of inquiry. This report consists of notes prepared for this workshop as well as a summary of discussions with some of those attending in New Orleans. The major focus is on the analysis of the development of formal educational systems. The report begins with an historical overview of work in this area and continues with discussi…
Briefer Comment
Journal Article Briefer Comment Get access Lyda Gordon Shivers, Lyda Gordon Shivers Woman's College of the University of North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bernhard J. Stern, Bernhard J. Stern Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Floyd Hunter, Floyd Hunter University of North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academ…
Educational Reform and Manufacturing Development in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
This dissertation attempts the following: first, to outline and document the precise dimensions of the historical coincidence between the rise of the factory system and the development of mass public schooling ln mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts; second, to set forth hypotheses explaining and relating these two developments; and finally, to evaluate these various propositions through the analysis of documentary: and statistical materials. Dur…
Research in Economic History: An Annual Compilation of Research. Vol. 1
Sectoral shift in antebellum Massachusetts: A reconsideration
Education and Social Programs
Research workshops offer an opportunity for both prospective and retrospective examinations of work in a particular area of inquiry. This report consists of notes prepared for this workshop as well as a summary of discussions with some of those attending in New Orleans. The major focus is on the analysis of the development of formal educational systems. The report begins with an historical overview of work in this area and continues with discussi…
Economic and Demographic Determinants of Educational Commitment: Massachusetts, 1855
More than half the variance in length of school session in a cross section of 329 localities in Massachusetts in 1855 can be explained by the share of Irish in.the town's population, the family per dwelling ratio, and a proxy for the share of male merchants over 15 in the population, all of which enter regression equations with strong positive coefficients. This paper considers what these results may tell us about a number of hypotheses that link…
Whither quantitative history: A review of some recent work in the economic and social history of education
The recent appearance of two books, both dealing with the relationships between education and economic and social structure in parts of nineteenth-century North America and both claiming to be examples of quantitative social science history (an appellation to which more attention will be given below) gives us an opportunity not only to assess their merits relative to each other, but also to pose, by implication, some general questions about the f…
The problem with neoclassical institutional economics: A critique with special reference to the North/Thomas model of pre-1500 Europe
Malthus's methodological and macroeconomic thought
Although Thomas Robert Malthus achieved his most lasting notoriety for one rather controversial idea – his so-called principle of population, he was also the author of an important general treatise on economic theory and policy, Principles of Political Economy, Considered With a View to their Practical Association. Published in 1820, three years after the first edition of David Ricardo’s magnum opus, Malthus’ contributions to economics have not b…
Land Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century American and British Technology
Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these propositions, and explores their interrelationships through the use of a linear model inspired by the writings of David Ricardo
A New Interpretation of the Onset of the Great Depression
Over the 1919–1929 period, fluctuations in the value of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange exercised statistically significant and economically important impacts on the demand to hold cash balances. The marked post–1925 rise in the volume and value of stock trading led to a measurable increase in the transactions demand to hold cash balances, an increase in demand not recognized or seriously discussed by individuals inside or outside of…
Microeconomics, Norms, and Rationality
The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism
On the unimportance of machinery
Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism. I: Europe and the World Economy
Modern Business Enterprise as a Capital-Saving Innovation
The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth-…
Economic History and the Modern Economist: Let Us Now Praise Exogenous Variables: A Review Essay on Economic History and the Modern Economist
Economic History and the Modern Economist, edited by William N. Parker, reprints with light revision a set of four papers delivered at the 1984 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings in Dallas. The set was subsequently published in the May 1985 American Economic Review, along with the comments of the original discussants, Don McCloskey and Gavin Wright, a foreword and afterword by Parker, a comment by Charles Kindleberger, who organized the…
The Future of Economic History
Do legal systems matter
Uncontrolled Land Development and the Duration of the Depression in the United States
Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continu…
The Magnetic Telegraph, Price and Quantity Data, and the New Management of Capital
The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital-savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control
French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration
Au XIX e siecle, le telegraphe et les chemins de fer ont ete un remarquable progres technologique, l'un apportant des informations, l'autre des marchandises. L'A. decrit la telegraphie optique en France, en analysant les proprietes de transmission des messages
Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939
Altruistically Inclined: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitiv…
Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitiv…
Economics (28 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · History (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (8 works) · Positive economics (7 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (6 works) · Economic history (6 works)