In 1955 fewer than 2% of the nation's residences had air conditioning; by 1980 over half were air conditioned, and over a quarter had central air. This paper attempts to explain the growth and the geographic differences in the prevalence of residential air conditioning from the mid fifties to...

At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled "A Theory of Production," which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb-Douglas function as a mathematical representation of the relationship between capital,...