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This paper explores some implications for the housing market of the operation of the land use planning system in the United Kingdom, drawing out the relevance of the methodology for other forms of land use regulation. In contrast to the American zoning system, the U.K. system ensures enough land is released to meet foreseeable housing needs by national allocation. However, the U.K. system is implemented and mediated locally in response to political and other pressures. Neo-classical comparative statics combined with a more behavioral approach enables us to examine the interface between three related sub-markets in a rapidly growing region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate appropriate methods of modelling the business cycle theory of trade union growth, and to develop and estimate a specification of the business cycle model. In so doing, the paper draws on the important pioneering work of Bain and Elsheikh (1976) for the United Kingdom. (The results of extension of the Bain and Elsheikh model to 1980 are shown in Appendix A.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Training through apprenticeship provided the main mechanism for occupational human capital formation in pre-industrial England. This paper demonstrates how training premiums (fees) complemented the formal legal framework surrounding apprenticeship to secure training contracts. Premiums varied in response to scarcity rents, the expected productivity of masters and apprentices, and served as compensation for the anticipated risk of default. In most trades premiums were small enough to allow access to apprenticeship training for youths from modest families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the popular music business in the US, the UK and West Germany as an example, this article shows how the value of cultural content is generated and negotiated in fields and that these values in turn shape the performance of cultural markets to a great extent. While in Western Germany a functional understanding of music persistently dominated, the participants of the music field in Britain in the 1960s began to orient their decisions toward what became defined as the artistic value of popular music. In contrast to Europe, where music producers and their values dominated the field, the US example is characterized by the fact that market research and its methods to quantify popularity played a central role in the production and dissemination of pop music early on. Comparing three distinct cases, the paper suggests employing the field concept to analyze both the change and the embeddedness of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two approaches to the analysis of economic data: the exclusively econometric approach recommended by Hendry and Ericsson and the more eclectic approach that we employed in our books Monetary History and Monetary Trends. It concludes that the article by Hendry and Ericsson is mislabeled. Their article is not in any relevant sense an evaluation of our "empirical model of U. K. money demand." Rather, it uses one equation from our book as a peg on which to hang an exposition of sophisticated econometric techniques. Insofar as their empirical findings do bear on ours, they simply confirm some of our principal results and contradict none. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the 'breadwinner-homemaker' household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner-homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources-especially for individualized expenditures-in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bibliography on the subject of the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland is presented, which includes the books "The English Country House: Explained," by T. Yorke, "The Plantation of Ulster," by J. Bardon, and "English Country House Eccentrics," by D. Evans.

The article reviews periodical literature on economic history that was published in 2011. Topics noted include the origins of medieval common rights systems, statistics from the record-keeping text "Little Domesday Book," and gender roles in medieval Europe. Also addressed are the history of British maritime trade, the payment of compensation to British slave owners following abolition, and the history of the Scottish banking system. In addition, the history of property rights, cultural aspects of feminism, and post-World War II British politics are discussed.

This article seeks to determine whether children aged 16 and over and who are living with their parents influence the household decision-making process. Assuming collective rationality within the household, we show how a minimal number of decision-makers can be inferred from the parametric constraints of the collective model. Using UK Family Expenditure Surveys, we find the data to be consistent with the children being decision-makers. When stratifying the sample by age and by gender, our results indicate that both children aged between 16 and 21 and daughters, irrespective of their age, are decision-makers. Results for sons and children age 22 and over are less conclusive. Finally, the collective model is never rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s the British building industry and building society movement waged an aggressive campaign to sell the idea of home ownership to a new mass market. A number of sophisticated marketing strategies were employed to transform the popular image of a mortgage from 'a millstone round your neck' to a key element of a new, suburbanized, aspirational lifestyle. Despite opportunistic behaviour by some developers, the spectacular success of this campaign both contributed to the fastest rate of growth in working-class owner-occupation during the twentieth century and had a substantial impact on consumption patterns for families that moved to the new estates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the attempts of British central government to react to the perceived inadequacy of official economic statistics. A huge amount of work went into this project, the main aim of which was to speed up the production of statistics so that the economy could be analysed in more detail, and thus better managed. If this was to work, more data was required on the labour market, on productivity, on production, and on the interlinkages between those indicators. British official statistics clearly were more comprehensive and more detailed at the end of this period than they had been at the start. Even so, the effort was usually thought to have been a failure by the early 1970s. More detail took time to produce; it was difficult to recruit the necessary staff; successive administrative reorganizations also absorbed energies. The devolved informality of British government hampered the emergence of an overall picture. Businesses and trade unions resisted attempts to collect more data, especially when it showed them in an unflattering light. Above all, the elite, specialist, and technical nature of the reform process meant that very little political and popular pressure built up to force through further changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon 'government failure': not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Imp licitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article examines the wide array of policy changes that flowed from the British government's adoption in the early 1960s of an explicit target for higher growth. It finds that the principal reasons for the failure of these policies can be found in the fragmentation and interdependence of Britain's economic institutions — the source of which lay in the particular historical development of Britain's polity. These issues of governance required new conceptions of both policy making and policy implementation able either to strengthen the power of the centre to impose change, or to promote consensus building. However, lacking a sufficient shock to the system, and imprisoned in a mindset in which the British state was conceived as both centralized and powerful, elites saw little need for fundamental institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the importance of market to consumers in the late medieval economy in Great Britain. Apart from the volume of international trade, which was worth more than 250,000 pound per annum for the whole of the period 1275- 1500, England's internal trade may well have handled a quarter or more of gross national product, the estimated proportion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late thirteenth century all sections of society participated in a complex commercial network: the aristocracy drew most of their landed income in cash from rents and the sale of demesne produce; peasants needed to raise money both to pay rents and to buy goods and services; the urban population depended for their incomes on the profits of trade and crafts; at least 1 in 3 of those living in both town and country earned wages, often paid in cash. Geographers explain the marketing pattern in terms of a spatial distribution of towns, which differed in size and function. Above the local network of small towns, the higher order centers sold a variety of specialized goods and services over a wide area, so that a customer requiring an unusual or expensive article would go to a large and distant center.

This article discusses the use of the Decree Rolls of Chancery as a source for economic history in Great Britain. Any reasonable assessment of the progress of historical research takes care to emphasize that patches of light and patches of darkness owe their distribution not so much to insight and blindness among the craftsmen as to the presence or absence of documentary evidence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much litigation in the Courts of Exchequer and Chancery was touched off by matters that are central to the concern of economic history, although means of access to the information embodied in the legal records quite fail to match the importance of these evidences for historical inquiry. It has long been known, principally through E.M. Leonard's work at the beginning of this century, that the Court of Chancery had a special role in the history of the English enclosure movement through its willingness to accept and adjudicate actions relating to land title where enclosure and redistribution of holdings had taken place. In a period when the motives and methods of enclosure were still displaying considerable variety there are instances of Chancery actions in which the litigants were genuinely in combat.

The article measures the effect of public finance during the period 1793-1815 on the rate and direction of Great Britain's economic development. It explores the country's involvement in war during the period. One aspect of the war which has intermittently attracted economists" attention from the time of the "bullionist" controversy is the effect of the expedients that were adopted in the field of public finance. The article describes the sources of data which economic historian can use to be able to fairly measure the effect of the country's finance on the rate and direction of economic growth. An analysis on the economic indicators during the period is presented.