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The article presents information about the wholesale wallpaper trade in the United States. The author presents a brief overview of the history of the U.S. wallpaper trade and census records of the industry's earning in 1849. Statistical information related to earnings and growth in the wallpaper industry are presented. A discussion is presented about the differences between wallpaper wholesaling and the distribution of other commodities, specifically the difference in marketing strategies used by buyers and distributors of wallpaper. Various trade organizations related to the wallpaper industry are mentioned.

The article presents an in-depth analysis of the archives of the Brown family, collected at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. In it the business activities of the family from the 18th to 20th centuries are charted. Comments are given highlighting the historical value of the papers, citing their remarkable comprehensiveness for such a long period. Issues addressed within the collection include records of business conditions and transactions during the Revolutionary War, the transitions in international business networks after the war, and the family's Western frontier land speculation ventures during the 19th-century.

The author comments on the papers by economists Robert H. Rasche and Leonall Andersen. The aim of the author is to demonstrate why the research conducted by Rasche and Andersen presents an important professional event and the analytical problems this event raises. It is explained that the event the author references is the establishment of monetarism as "conventional wisdom." In Andersen's research he attests to the legitimacy of the monetarist succession by citing the now-familiar litany of impressive empirical research results achieved at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. Rasche's research demonstrates that the FRB-MIT-Penn Model has to incorporate what the author takes as being the critical structural element of monetarism.

The author comments on the usefulness of a monetary commission in the United States. The author cites the work of economists, Robert Z. Aliber, William G. Dewald, and Scott Gordon. It is suggested that the economists do not take a position on the question of the prospective usefulness of the monetary commission. The author asserts that they should have used a cross-sectional study of a number of commissions according to type. The author also expresses criticism towards the authors for not offering ideas for the formation of a new commission.

This article presents the author's view on George Stigler's paper debunking the effects of economic conditions on electoral results in the United States. I view Stigler's paper as a healthy antidote to conventional wisdom and a refreshing contrast to the frequent practice of computer-users of running regressions until they find something significant. Nonetheless, I believe there is more to the relation between voting behavior and general economic conditions than meets the jaundiced eye, and I am particularly concerned that Stigler's criticisms should be correctly interpreted as dropping the gauntlet--and not a wet blanket--on research in this area. I do not share his negative presumptions about the satisficing model in general or its applicability to voting behavior in particular. To use his example of a 3 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, it tells us far more than the extra number of people unemployed at a moment of time. It also means that an extra 12 percent of all adult male workers will have experienced some costly spell of unemployment within the preceding year. Without a reliable theoretical guide, the specification of favorable economic conditions becomes a matter of hunch and taste. In the final section of his paper, Stigler sets forth as an alternative a long-memory model of how macroeconomic performance might influence voters. Unlike the Kramer satisficing voter who sees the two parties only as ins and outs, the Stigler long-memory voter has a definite perception of Republicans and Democrats.

This article focuses on papers discussed at the round table meeting on "the teaching of elementary economics" on December 30, 1949, at New York. Since the movement toward a general course in the social sciences seems to one essential it would be useful at this stage to collate the experiences of the hundred institutions now engaged in offering such a course. Fortunately both the American Economic Association and the American Political Science Association are engaged in a survey of this field by questionnaire and interviews. It is already clear, however, that the general course can be expected to follow no set formula. Its content and emphasis will vary from college to college with the abilities, interests, and philosophies of the staff members, and with the financial resources of the institution. One do not consider such diversity unfortunate. It is fragmentation and compartmentalization which are making the teaching of the social sciences increasingly ineffective in the light of social integration today. The closest integration will continue to recognize the infinite diversity contained in the fundamental unity of society.

Focuses on the supposed necessity of the issue of legal tender notes during the U.S. civil war of 1861-1865. Views of member of Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. Samuel Hooper on the issue of legal tender notes; Passage of the Legal Tender Act in the U.S. Congress in February 1862; Arguments in favor of Legal Tender Act over the plan offered by the minority of the U.S. Ways and Means ommittee.

This article discusses the effect on income of Phase II of the wage-price control program of the United States. Several discussants commented on the issue of income shares under the Phase II program. R. A. Gordon, William Branson, and others noted that, with productivity growing exceptionally fast because of the rapid cyclical expansion expected in the economy, profit margins would widen so much that some cost absorption by business would still permit the profit share to expand. Arthur Okun noted that Perry's neutrality was defined as the state of income shares that would prevail in the absence of the program and that the cyclical expansion of profit margins that we are experiencing would have occurred anyhow. Gardner Ackley argued that we did not know enough about what has happened to price-cost relations in recent years to take any strong position about what income shares should be. Therefore Perry's neutrality concept should not override the need to slow inflation, and some cost absorption was appropriate as a way to help accomplish this. James Duesenberry and Michael Posner felt that the most serious practical problem was not the question of existing income shares but rather delivering on the promise to slow prices noticeably. The trade unions are reluctant to accept wage controls because they have little faith that the inflation will slow down. Differing views were expressed on the use of profit margin ceilings in Phase II. Alan Greenspan pointed out that the application of the rules on the basis of the margins of individual firms would hold down overall prices and margins more than people thought.

Comments on an article about public pressures and values affecting forest management and timber supply in the United States. Effects of the criticism made by preservationists against industrial forest landowners; Discussion on legislative issues; Problems that log export trade faces.

This section introduces the articles which appeared in the March 1972 issue of the "Brookings Papers on Economic Activity." In the first article, William Branson estimates that the 1971 currency re-alignment, when fully effective, will bolster the United States merchandise trade balance by $7 billion to $8 billion a year. The effect of the devaluation of the U.S. dollar on the trade balance depends on how much it raises the dollar prices of U.S. imports, how much it lowers the prices of U.S. exports in terms of the currencies of buyers, and how responsive both buyers and sellers are to price changes -- that is, how large their price elasticities are. As Branson views the process, exporters set the price tags on tradeable goods in terms of their own currency. The paper by F. Thomas Juster and Paul Wachtel examines the effects of inflation and of transitory changes in income on consumer saving and spending behavior, with particular reference to the inflationary experience of recent years. The authors seek to explain consumer demand in several different ways, relying on both subjective data drawn from surveys of households and objective economic variables such as income, relative prices, and the rates of unemployment and of inflation. In the third article, Arthur Okun reaffirms analytically the desirability of an activist fiscal-monetary strategy. Like other Keynesian economists, Okun believes that fiscal and monetary policy should be shifted toward stimulus or restraint in light of observed and predicted economic fluctuations.

This section presents the report of the American Economic Review's managing editor on the number of manuscripts submitted to the journal in 1972. In 1970, the journal reached a high mark of 879 manuscripts submitted. The number has now declined for two successive years. The backlog of accepted papers has not changed. As of December 31, 1972. there are seventy-four accepted papers which have not yet been published. Twenty-two will appear in the March 1973 issue and twenty-seven in June. The remaining twenty-five will appear September or December 1973. Because of the smaller size of manuscripts, the journal was able to print 143 this year, compared with 115 last year. Thus the ratio of printed to submitted manuscripts rose to 20 percent. Just as the ratio does not indicate the probability of accepting a manuscript, an increase in the ratio does not mean we are printing poorer quality manuscripts. The quality has gone up. The average size of articles in 1972 is 12.5 pages and the average size of communications is 4.1 pages, a reduction from last year. The total size of the journal (1,081 net pages) is slightly longer than planned last year, and it will be held at this size. The journal printed the same number of copies in 1972 as 1971.

The article discusses the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the 1965 issue of the journal "Kyklos." The first paper of the journal "On the Interpretation of the Just Price," by Samuel Hollander, argues that the just price is related to production costs within the medieval context of social status. The second paper of the journal is "Today's Circumstances and Yesterdays Theories: Malthus on Services," by J.J. Spengler. The third paper of the journal "Sources of Variation in the Capital-Output Ratio in the United States Private Business Sector, 1909-1959," by John E. La Tourette, examines the source of variation in the capital coefficient for the United States private business sector during the 1909-1959 periods. In the paper "Theme and Variations--Remarks on the Kaldorian Distribution Formula," by K.W. Rothschild, the author opines that the Keynesian distribution formula is very useful when considered as a tautological formulation of the coherence between investment, saving and income as circulatory components.

The article presents a critique of a study by Edward E. Edwards called "Changing Character of the Real Estate Mortgage Markets" that appears in this issue. Edwards, in his article, implies that mortgage funds are in short supply, which would impact liquidity and capital adequacy that would force savings and loan associations to leave the mortgage market. The author feels that Edwards does not prove that there is such a shortage and does not consider factors like mortgage rates or terms. The author also addresses Edwards' comments about capital requirements and says that his statement that the U.S. Federal Home Loan Bank Board restricting growth rates in capital shortage areas is erroneous.

The papers by economists James M. Buchanan and Julius Margolis deal primarily with voting, while economist Roland N. McKean's paper is concerned mainly with politicians and bureaucrats. The subjects of these papers therefore fall squarely within the domain of political science. Another characteristic that these papers have in common is a concern with the way political processes determine the amount of resources allocated to the production of public goods. Buchanan and McKean suggest that the U.S. political and fiscal system systematically tends to allocate excessive resources to the satisfaction of social wants, while Margolis suggests that local referendums, at least, can lead to less than optimal levels of public investment. the possible tendency toward excessive purchases of public goods in Buchanan's final model may well be counteracted by opposing factors. First, demonstration effects are surely strongest in the private sector, and they tend to lead toward an excessive purchase of private goods. Second, billions of dollars are spent advertising private goods, while public goods are normally not similarly advertised.

This article presents a comment on economist M.A. Adelman's paper. Adelman's paper makes three major points— first, that competition is feasible in the oil industry, second, that domestic regulatory policies of the U.S. have produced monstrous wastes, third, that the wastes caused by such monopoly as persists in foreign oil markets are far less important than those attributable to domestic cartelization. He also makes certain predictions about the future course of world oil prices and prospective competitiveness of atomic power. His argument here is based essentially on the industry's inherent tendency to statically diminishing returns. On Adelman's third major point, the contrast he draws between the circumstances at home and abroad is instructive. But in pressing the contrast, it seems that he has at some points minimized unduly the persistence of monopoly in foreign production. The evidence of how much remains is the fact, emphasized several times by him, that the price, though much reduced, is still far above finding-developing-operating costs.

The paper proposes the use of linear programming to "solve" a specific freight car allocation situation wherein a choice of freight cars is available for shipper shipments, and the railroad's car allocation objective is to maximize the expression (freight car rental receivables-freight car rental payables). The freight car rental payment structure which is applicable is that of "time-mileage per diem" rates proposed in the United States by the Interstate Commerce Commission. The paper first describes the problem and its background, and then a model and various extensions are formulated. An example illustrates how costly to a railroad the difference between good and bad car allocation may be. Although the proposed linear programming approach may be manually tractable for small volume car allocation situations, the paper concludes that in most car allocation situations, the approach requires a computerized data base with a "real-time" information and communications system which includes order entry, car rental, routing-distance, and train travel time and yard delay time information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of inflation and of transitory changes in income on consumer saving and spending behavior in the United States. To judge from the recent pronouncements of the forecasting fraternity, uncertainty about the behavior of consumers is at the heart of differences in view about macroeconomic policy at the present time. The inability of the economic recovery to gather sufficient force to bite into unemployment rates has been widely attributed to continued hesitancy and caution of consumers as reflected in exceptionally high ratios of personal saving to disposable income. And differences of opinion about the probable vigor or sluggishness of the recovery are due in considerable part to differences in judgments about the probable consumer response to the unfolding economic situation. One of the major sources of uncertainty about consumer reactions concerns the way that price inflation, both expected and realized, influences consumer decisions about spending or saving. This paper attempts to mine survey measures of consumer expectations, attitudes, and plans in an effort to determine their usefulness in predicting and explaining consumer behavior. We ask two questions: First, what is the role of these anticipatory variables in models designed to forecast consumer behavior? Second, what are the economic variables underlying the movement of consumer anticipation?

This article presents the author's opinion with regard to George Stigler's views on the practice of political economy in the United States. The evidence presented in the paper of Stigler seems persuasive to me. It is difficult to look at this analysis and still subscribe to the widely held view that election results are highly sensitive to swings in business conditions. Once again we seem to have found that what everybody knows to be true is not necessarily true. Since Stigler's analysis on macro evidence is exhaustive and impressive, suppose we turn to micro evidence to see if it provides any clues to an understanding of why the macro results turn out the way that they do. Here we do gain some insight into attitudes pertinent to Stigler's analysis. What the views of Stigler suggest is that within reasonable tolerances, changes in political sentiment are more apt to reflect the myriad of other factors that bear on voter sentiment. If the swing is outside these tolerances, or if the event is sufficiently visible or discrete, economic developments can exert a substantial effect on citizen support or the incumbent. If therefore, the economic indicators start to waver, the economist may sleep well at night, knowing that in all probability it means little, but the politician may for very good reasons remains awake, wondering if this will be one of those cases that transforms him into a statesman.

This article is a sequel to an earlier study of postwar U.S. financial behavior. The earlier study presented a nineteen-equation quarterly model of supplies and demands in major financial markets. It included detailed discussion of individual supply and demand relationships, but it did not deal with the properties of the model as a whole. The present paper explores the properties of the complete model by means of a series of simulation runs. The article is in three parts following introduction. The first part is a brief and necessarily incomplete summary of the model. The second is the core of the article, a description of the simulation runs and an attempt to account for the principal results in terms of the relevant properties of the underlying equations. The final part contains a brief summary and some remarks on the uses of the simulation results. The simulations which have been discussed suggest a number of propositions about financial markets. these propositions are not intended as realistic predictions of how financial markets behave. They are a set of hypotheses about financial market behavior suggested by the underlying, exploratory model and abstracting from the effects of financial markets on markets for real goods and services.

This article focuses on three papers on the regulated industries. Economist George Wilson seeks to appraise the effect of regulation upon resource allocation in transportation. Economist Roger C. Cramton seeks to test the efficiency of regulation in certain subject-matter areas. Economist Richard E. Caves poses questions with respect to the market performance of the regulated industries and seeks to explore methods by which answers may be sought. In Wilson's discussion of regulatory attitudes toward discrimination he ignores, although he has elsewhere recognized, the tendency for the relatively uniform treatment of distance despite varying conditions of density, terrain, and other factors which affect cost to create a reverse discrimination akin to the type imposed by reluctance to countenance reduced rates for shipments in excess of carload lots. It is, perhaps, surprising that in his discussion of the share-the-traffic criterion he does not call attention to the consequences of enforcing a division of traffic between competing modes when the differences in cost levels are sharp.

This article presents discussion regarding understanding of economics by the whole population. American Economic Association has organized a meeting concerning this issue. According to the author, the far-reaching significance of this development is still only dimly realized. The authors of these three stimulating and instructive papers have referred repeatedly to the National Task Force on Economic Education. members of the American Economic Association realize how much the economics profession owes to the Committee for Economic Development and the Joint Council on Economic Education for initiating this frontal attack on economic ignorance, for putting this Association in the forefront in this nation-wide effort, and for giving the economics profession full academic freedom, for the content of these several programs. Although it is only right that the economists themselves should receive full credit for their professional performances. But without the stimulation, encouragement, and financial support from National Task Force report, Material Evaluation Committee report, and television series it would not have been possible to discuss the merits and limitations of the report of the National Task Force here.

The article discusses the works of Bernard F. Haley and Richard Ruggles on the curricula of economics as a discipline in undergraduate and graduate programs in the U.S. The author of this article feels that there is an omission from Professor Haley's remarks on the elementary course. Professor Haley says that few instructors in the subject are happy with the course as it now is. But he offers no explanation other than that of cultural lag and poor textbooks for this phenomenon. Since it is a rare institution in which a noneconomist dictates the content of the beginning course or the textbook used, the basic question which Professor Haley has not answered is why economists persist in their unhappy ways. Professor Ruggles' paper suggests an approach to the second stage in which economics faculties in the universities will no longer be interested in teaching advanced undergraduate courses since these must perforce be designed for students who either are not concentrating in economics or, if they are, do not plan to go into graduate work in the field.

The article focuses on the seventy fourth annual meeting of the American Economic Association to be held in New York from 27 to 29, 1961. Executive Committee dinner meeting will be held on December 26, 1961 at 6:00 p.m. On December 27, 1961 there would be a seminar on systems of economic accounts and analysis for urban region. Edgar D. Hoover of Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association would be the chairperson of the seminar. Discussants would include — Meredith B. Givens of Institute of Public Administration and Frederick T. Moore of The Rand Corp. Seminar on rural poverty and national policy would be held at 2:30 P.M. on December 29, 1961. Professor William H. Nichols of Vanderblit University would be the chairperson for the seminar. Papers to be discussed in the seminar include — "Economic Security for Agricultural Labor," by Louis Levine, "Relation of the Low Income Farm Problem to Major National Economic Problems," by Leonard P. Hendrix. Discussants include — professor Leonard P. Adams of Cornell University and John G. McNeely of Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.

The article presents authors' comments on two papers on teaching economics at high school level in the U.S. by economists Howard S. Ellis and G.L. Bach. Both professors Ellis and Bach have asked for a separate course to be taught in the high schools by competent teachers who understand the spirit of the discipline as well as its techniques. Both have asked that the theory should be made the center of the course. Those who have examined the high school texts and know how heavily they emphasize consumer finance will see this as a distinct step forward. Both have also noted in their papers that the citizen is not in a position to think about public policy without a basic understanding of economics. Professor Ellis has designed his semester course around the needs of the citizen, and Bach has promised that his task force would present a statement of the minimum level of economics essential to good citizenship and reasonably attainable through the high schools. The article agrees that a theory oriented economics course for the citizen is a good first goal in view of the present state of economic illiteracy in the public school system.

This article presents a discussion on the research paper "An Empirical Measurement of the Built-In Flexibility of the Individual Income Tax," in the U.S., by Leo Cohen, a professor at the Kansas State College, Kansas. Economists have long believed that the built-in flexibility of the individual income tax is substantial. But this expectation has not been confirmed by the data. The built-in flexibility of any tax can be regarded as the product of the built-in flexibility of the tax base and the marginal rate of tax on the change in the tax base. The built-in flexibility of the individual income tax turns out to be low for two reasons, the proportion of a rise in personal incomes that appears in the tax base is surprisingly low, on the order of 55 percent, and the marginal rate applying to a change in the tax base has never exceeded 31 percent at 1953 rates and 28 percent at present rates, and most of the time it has been substantially lower. As a consequence, the maximum observed built-in flexibility of the individual income tax has been no higher than about 17 percent at 1953 rates and 15.5 percent at present rates in the U.S.

The article presents the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the July 1965 issue of the "Southern Economic Journal." The first paper of the journal is "Short-Run Returns to Scale and the Production of Services," by W. David Maxwell. The second paper "The Association of Income and Education for Males by Region, Race, and Age," by Roy L. Lassiter, employs correlation and regression techniques and data from the 1960 Census of Population to analyze the relationship between income and education for males in South and non-south areas of the United States by race and age. The third paper "The Cyclical Behavior of Consumers' Income and Spending: 1921-1961," by Saul H. Hymans, focuses on personal consumption in an attempt to judge whether any environmental or behavioral changes which may have occurred in the past four decades in U.S. economy have acted to reduce the cyclical sensitivity of important component of gross national product. The fifth paper of the journal "On Liquidity and Transaction Costs," by H. Laurence Miller, attempts to clarify the concept of liquidity while investigating the relationship between liquidity and transaction costs.

The article discusses the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the March 1966 issue of the "Journal of Finance." The first paper of the journal "Tight Money, Monetary Restraint, and the Price Level," by George Horwich, opines that anti-inflationary monetary policy has long been criticized as being inherently perverse: such policy, because it raises interest rates, raises business costs and thereby the price levels itself. This argument is analyzed within a model that treats the interest rate broadly as a proxy for all property returns. The second article is "Can Monetary Policy Influence the Availability of Credit?" by A. Dale Tussing, draws a clear conceptual distinction between demand-behavior theories and availability theories. The third paper "Firm Size and the Cost of Externally Secured Equity Capital," by Stephen H. Archer and LeRoy G. Faerber, is a study of 238 new industrial common stock registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during the three years, 1960-1962.

The article discusses the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the August 1965 issue of the "Journal of Political Economy." The first article of the journal "Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, 1922-33: A Reinterpretation," by Elmus R. Wicker, explains the seemingly anomalous behavior of U.S. monetary policy between 1922 and 1933. The second paper is "The Reluctant Consumer and Economic Fluctuations in the Soviet Union," by Marshall I. Goldman. The third paper "Interest-Rate Risk and the Term Structure of Interest Rates," by James Van Horne, analyzes the term structure of interest rates, using monthly treasury yield-curve data that appeared in the "Treasury Bulletin" for the 1954-63 period. The fourth paper "Productivity and Technology Change in the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1919-54," by G.S. Maddala, analyzes productivity and technological change in the bituminous coal industry in the U.S. by using the familiar technique of aggregate production functions. The data used are cross-state data for the census years 1919, 1929, 1939, and 1954. The stability of the production-function coefficients has been tested, and shifts in the production function have been estimated by the introduction of shift parameters rather than of time trends.

The tenth annual meeting of the American Association of University Instructors in Accounting was especially noteworthy because of the able papers given on the subject "Research Work in Universities." Inspired by these papers the present writer decided to ascertain approximately what graduate work in applied economics the American universities were doing. As there were no data available on this subject, a survey was started. This paper is the result of the survey conducted by the Association. The basic courses in commercial law are so fundamental that practically all graduate schools of business offer them. The commercial law courses are 8.4% of the total applied economic courses in non-urban schools and 6.2% in urban schools. This variation is due to the difference in the total number of courses offered in non-urban and urban schools as the number of commercial law courses offered is practically constant. The unusual number of commercial law courses offered at American University and Pennsylvania University is doubtless due to local conditions, the excellent standing of the graduate law school at the former and unusual complexities of the State law code at the latter. Business management ranks first or is tied for first among the applied economic groups in five out of the twenty-seven schools.

A conference paper about the transportation of goods and of raw materials in Latin America is presented. The author believes that countries such as Brazil need to build railroads in order to transport materials to seaports for trade purposes. Also discussed is the role of fast traveling ships and loading and storage facilities in the transport of goods.