This version of William Ripley’s course on corporations was the fourth time of what would become a standard offering. He was an institutionalist-style economist who wallowed in the utter variety of economic organisations, be they on the side of labor or corporate capital. These did not fit neatly into the perfectly competitive theory of markets. He was interested in larger molecules and not so much in the atoms of economic life. __________________________ Other Corporations/Industrial Organization Related Posts for William Z. Ripley Problems of Labor and Industrial Organization, 1902-1903. Eco ..read more

This post provides material from William Zebina Ripley’s fifth iteration of his labor economics course at Harvard. A quick search using the usual internet sources that have proven handy for Economics in the Rear-view Mirror picked up a few facts about the teaching assistant for the course who would have been a law student at the time. __________________________ Meet the course teaching assistant Edwin DeTurck Bechtel. b. 19 Aug 1880 in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania d. 4. Jul 1957 in Bedford Four Corners, New York Home: Calcium, Pennsylvania. High School in Reading, Pennsylvania. Recipient of the ..read more

Before Abbott Payson Usher (1883-1965) and Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) and after William Ashley (1860-1927), Professor Edwin Francis Gay (1867-1946) taught European Economic history in the Harvard economics department. This post adds to the collection of his examination questions transcribed and posted at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. __________________________ Previously posted: European economic history taught at Harvard A brief course description for Economics 11 plus the exams from 1902-03. Exams for 1903-04. Exams for 1904-05. Exams for 1905-06 A short bibliography for “seriou ..read more

Edwin Francis Gay solo-taught the course on U.S. economic and financial history in 1906-07. He modified and expanded the course reading list from that used in the previous year by him and Taussig, but the structure of the course nonetheless appears to have been essentially unchanged. __________________________ Previously… Assistant Professor Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague taught the Harvard course “Economic History of the United States”/ “Economic and Financial History of the United States” in 1901-02 (with James Horace Patten), 1902-03, 1903-04, and 1904-05. The course was taken over ..read more

With the railroad industry posing so many interesting questions in the organization and regulation of industry, corporate finance, and economic geography it comes as no wonder that William Zebina Ripley taught one of the more popular advanced courses offered by the Harvard economics department early in the 20th century. Worth noting is that the instructions for course reports transcribed below was only very slightly changed from an earlier version (1903-04). __________________________ Earlier exams etc. for Economics 5 1900-01 (Hugo Richard Meyer alone) 1901-02 (Ripley with Hugo Richard M ..read more

  The only remarkable thing to note about the following macroeconomics examination from Johns Hopkins is its somewhat confusing scheme for allowing students to select from the questions. No heroic leaps of imagination were demanded of the examinees, which is humane I guess. But an artifact is an artifact, so duly transcribed, posted, and added to the collection. ______________________________ MACROECONOMIC THEORY 18.604 Final Examination, May 21, 1962 Messrs. [Joseph] Aschheim, [Carl] Christ, and [Edwin] Mills Answer all questions except: either       (a) three of ..read more

  Thomas Nixon Carver was on a European sabbatical with his wife and three children during the academic year 1906-07 so substitutes were needed to cover his courses on sociology, agriculture and income distribution. The graduate student James A. Field took over the principles of sociology course in Carver’s absence. Note: Materials from some courses have already been transcribed and posted. Whenever that is the case, I’ll just add a link to the relevant post. Falling between Economics 1 and Economics 3 was Frank W. Taussig’s course, Economics 2 (“Principles of Economics–Second Course”). I ..read more

It is now time to begin posting transcriptions of course material for the Harvard academic year 1906-07. Sometimes, even for the curator of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror, this becomes a tedious task. Still, the opportunity to assemble a long time series of economics exams into searchable text for one of the leading economics departments has the virtue of being steady work.  In the beginning… there is the undergraduate principles of economics course and that is the subject of this post. Subsequent posts more or less follow the course numbering used at the time by Harvard. _____________ ..read more

Charles Edward Lindblom (1917-2018!) was a Chicago economics Ph.D. (1945) who ultimately climbed as far up the Yale ranks as you could get – a Sterling Professorship of Political Science and Economics. He was working on his 1977 book Politics and Markets when I took a course with him in the Spring semester of 1973. His lectures have left no real mark on me, but I recall my impression of watching a thinker in real time who would dare to attempt to think things through while lecturing. I guess it should come as no surprise that someone who attained fame through an article with the title “The Sci ..read more

One of the first professors to lead me into the field of comparative economic systems was John Michael Montias (1928-2005). He provided me an early exposure to the economic theory behind the indexes of comparative productivity computed by Abram Bergson (see Chapter 6 by Bergson and also Chapter 7 by Evsey Domar published in Alexander Eckstein (ed.), Comparison of Economic Systems: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. U. of California Press, 1971). The portrait shows Mike Montias in his early thirties, a beaming assistant professor at Yale. I include the short biographical clip from The Y ..read more