ECONOMIC HISTORY FIELD EXAM
U.C. BERKELEY
JANUARY 2007
Answer one question from Part A, one from Part B, and one from Part C:
PART A:
1. It is now 40 years since Peter Temin wrote his classic article on the debate
over labor scarcity and the “American system.” Many subsequent studies have
addressed this topic. How much of the labor-scarcity paradigm survives this
reassessment? If you were to teach the labor-scarcity debate to first-year
graduate students, how would you characterize it?
2. Friedman and Schwartz, Romer and Romer, and Richardson and Troost all
emphasize the usefulness of natural experiments in identifying the real effects
of monetary policy shocks. What dangers or pitfalls do you see in relying on
such an approach? Can you suggest solutions or partial remedies to some of
these dangers?
3. There is much discussion of the dollar as an international currency: will it
lose its dominant role as a reserve, vehicle and international investment
currency to the euro, the yen or the yuan? What does the history of
international currencies tell us about the prospects?
4. What factors made England (as opposed to, say, Holland, northern France,
western Germany, or northern Italy—this is a “within Europe” question) the "first
industrial nation"? Given that there would be an industrial revolution in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, why did it happen in England?
PART B:
1. The legacy of slavery continued to influence the economic development of
the U.S. South for decades following the American Civil War. What were the
most important channels through which this influence was felt?
2. Various hypotheses have been advanced as an explanation for the high
inflation of the 1970s in the United States. Choose two of these hypotheses
and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each.
3. To what extent can you tell the story of the nineteenth-century development
of political economy as a reflection of the structure and transformation of the
economies in which various political economists lived? To what extent must the
story be not an “external” but an “internal” one—in which doctrines and their
