The paper compares Feinstein’s and Clark’s consumer price and real wage indices for theBritish industrial revolution. The sources for their weights and component price series areevaluated. While some of Clark’s innovations are improvements, many of his changesdegrade the price index. A new...

In China urban residents have traditionally been protected against labour marketcompetition from rural-urban migrants. Over the period of urban economic reform, rural-urbanmigration was allowed to increase in order to fill the employment gap as growth of labourdemand outstripped that of the...

Social capital is thought to play an economic role in the labour market. It may beparticularly pertinent in one that is in transition from an administered to a market-orientedsystem. One factor that may determine success in the underdeveloped Chinese labourmarket is thus guanxi, the Chinese...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distributionbut not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paperclaims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way thatthe tax and benefit system does and thus may be...

This study provides statistical evidence that Russian rural/urban wages diverged substantiallyduring the industrialization of Russia in the late nineteenth century. However, over time boththe variation declined and integration somewhat increased as rural labor responded to newopportunities. The...