This dissertation explores how economic institutions governing finance and investment have contributed to growth in reform-era China. Economic and political reforms transformed Chinas prior centrally-planned economy. Although reforms incorporated elements of market institutions and private enterprise, state institutions exercising extensive authority over a wide range of economic affairs critically and fundamentally played a central role in transforming this economy from one of the worlds poorest to the worlds second largest in the span of one generation. I explain the emergence of a unique configuration of institutions supportive of industrial policy implemented by largely autonomous local government officials. In combination with state-directed bank credit, this local government industrial policy finance has played a significant and positive role in development of exports in China. Though private entrepreneurs are often seen as dynamic engines of growth in Chinas reform-era economy, I show the vast majority of entrepreneurs are low-skilled, low-productivity, and exhibit non-positive rates of capital accumulation. Most entrepreneurs would experience higher earnings were they not segmented into self-employment occupations by adverse socioeconomic conditions. Rather than engines of growth, Chinas entrepreneurs resemble more the vast numbers of informal sector self-employment prevalent in many developing countries.

In this dissertation I develop a Marxian class analysis of corn-producing family farms in the Midwestern United States during the early twentieth century. I theorize the family farm as a complex hybrid of mostly feudal and ancient class structures that has survived through a contradictory combination of strategies that includes the feudal exploitation of farm family members, the cannibalization of neighboring ancient farmers in a vicious hunt for superprofits, and the intervention of state welfare programs. The class-based definition of the family farm yields unique insights into three broad aspects of U.S. agricultural history. First, my analysis highlights the crucial, yet under-recognized role of farm women and children’s unpaid labor in subsidizing the family farm. Second I offer a new, class-based perspective on the roots of the twentieth century “miracle of productivity” in U.S. agriculture, the rise of the agribusiness giants that depended on the perpetual, technology-induced crisis of that agriculture, and the implications of government farm programs. Third, this dissertation demonstrates how the unique set of contradictions and circumstances facing family farmers during the early twentieth century, including class exploitation, were connected to concern for their ability to serve the needs of U.S. industrial capitalist development. The argument presented here highlights the significant costs associated with the intensification of exploitation in the transition to industrial agriculture in the U.S. The family farm is implicated in this social theft. Ironically, the same family farm is often held up as the bedrock of American life. Its exalted status as an example of democracy, independence, self-sufficiency, and morality is enabled among other things by the absence of class awareness in U.S. society. When viewed through the lens of class, the hallowed family farm becomes example of one of the most exploitative institutions in the U.S. economy. The myth of its superiority takes on a new significance as one of the important non-economic processes helping to overdetermine the family farm’s long survival, while participating in foreclosing truly radical transformations of these institutions to non-exploitative alternatives.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between law and the rise of capitalism in the U.S. First, I analyze the changing relationship between labor productivity and pay at the Lawrence #2 textile mill in Massachusetts between 1834 and 1855. I estimate a model of productivity under a piece rate contract. Results show that the relationship between changes in the wage and changes in productivity was negative in the 1830s, slightly positive in the 1840s, and strongly positive in the late-1840s to 1850s. I argue that changes in relative worker bargaining power, the intensification of work flow, and the importance of liquidity constraints due to the decline of agriculture in the Northeast are the main factors underlying this shift. Second, I study the impact of contract law on state-level economic performance. Using the contrasting cases of Connecticut and Vermont I find that the development of legal thought on contracts was not composed of a single path toward ``modernity'', as the legal historiography suggests. The Vermont legal system developed outside of the mainstream framework. Using census statistics and histories of labor and manufacturing in the two states, I then argue that this difference had an impact on the nature of state-level economic growth. Finally, I provide the first economic history of the antebellum ten hour movement. I study the historical background as well as the quantitative effects of the movement via the ten hour statutes that were passed in select states between 1847 and 1855. Using historical accounts, I first give an overview of each state's ten hour movement. Using the historical analysis as a light to shed on each state, I then use a difference-in-differences identification strategy to consider whether states that passed more stringent laws (which did not allow workers and employers to ``contract out'' of the ten hour law) saw a greater reduction in hours worked. I do find that the ten hour laws had an impact, but I suggest that the movement's effects were either amplified or tempered according to the strength and tactics of a state's labor movement.

In view of the prevalence of information asymmetry and incentive incompatibility problems, the market for capital and the employment relationship are shown to be prey to pervasive agency problems that make economic transactions subject to enforcement costs. The presence of these costs subverts the Walrasian presumption of efficiency for decentralized markets, and the separation between efficiency and ownership concerns, resulting in forms of capital rationing and productive inefficiencies. Under these conditions, government intervention might help to attenuate the coordination failures and their associated efficiency losses for the economy by facilitating ownership of assets by those economic agents for whom information is relatively costless, and who have the capacity to take into account the consequences for all stakeholders. In this dissertation, we test the hypothesis that a union-controlled investment fund, such as the Fonds de solidarite des travailleurs du Quebec (FSTQ) might constitute an institutional innovation attenuating problems of information asymmetry and incentive incompatibilities. Through a case-study, we first analyze the original institutional features of the FSTQ that could help alleviate and/or compound the said agency problems. We then turn to an analysis of a segment of the FSTQ investment portfolio to verify whether these FSTQ-specific institutional features generate gains or losses for stakeholders, the economy and the government. On the basis of the evidence gathered, it is shown that the FSTQ effectively helps relieve problems of capital rationing; and fosters greater labor-management cooperation that results--under certain conditions--in measurable labor productivity gains, thus engendering a net social gain. In view of these gains and of the concentration of the FSTQ investments in the riskier end of the investment spectrum, it is argued that government support of the FSTQ in the form of tax expenditures is justified and engenders a net fiscal surplus.

Despite the voluminous literature on North-South macroeconomic interactions and the key role of terms of trade variations in growth transmission from one region to another, a significant research gap persists for two reasons. First, there has been very little empirical work on testing of the relationships between growth patterns and terms of trade movements. Second, the empirical studies dedicated to testing the Prebisch-Singer Thesis (PST) focused on testing the long-run tendency for the terms of trade of primary commodities to deteriorate and neglected the joint nature of the predictions arising out of a complete formulation of PST. This dissertation seeks to properly specify the PST, provide a generalization of it to the case of imbalanced trade, and extend it to a three-region framework through a structuralist North-South model. Multiple paths of growth divergence/convergence and terms of trade deterioration/improvement emerge depending on the structural changes influencing the income-elasticity differentials. I carry out two sets of empirical analyses. First, I use aggregate data on North-South terms of trade indices to test the presence and significance of a downward trend. Second, I use panel data analysis and rolling regressions to show the evolution of income-elasticity differentials. The results suggest that the growth rates of developing countries during the 1980s declined in both absolute and relative terms partly as a result of the downward trend in terms of trade and partly as a result of income elasticity differentials reflecting the productive and technological asymmetries between the developed and developing economies. However, these structural asymmetries have not remained constant: the results show that they changed both over time and over cross-sections of different groups of countries. In general the countries that diversified towards manufactured exports had better chances of eliminating the elasticity differentials, and thus attaining relatively higher rates of growth. The cross-country study is complemented by a comparative case study of Turkey and Malaysia. The results show that industrial and trade policies, if carefully designed and effectively implemented, can counter potential costs of external market dynamics while taking advantage of the opportunities for advancing dynamic comparative advantages.

What does socialism mean? This word carries many implications and in this thesis I consider how the concept of socialism was constructed within the discourses of classical Marxian economic and social theory. Socialism is understood to refer both to a general theory of historical and economic development as well as a particular post capitalist political economic system. One of the chief aims of this thesis is to examine the relationship between these two different levels of meaning of the word socialism. The classical Marxian discourse I analyze has three important levels or aspects which are combined in various ways to produce complex, though ultimately reductive, understandings of socialism. These are discourses of economic determinism, relative autonomy, and class analysis. How these modes of thought serve as the basis for policy, historical analysis and the construction of socialism as a political economic system is the principle topic of this thesis. I develop this thesis by examining three "moments" in the classical tradition: the work of the latter Engels, the period of the Second International, and Russian Marxism. Engels' work provides a basis for what follows as he subtly articulates the discourses of determinism, relative autonomy and class to produce a teleological vision of socialism. Later writers reproduce the tension created by the simultaneous use of the discourses of determinism and relative autonomy. The Second International, chiefly represented here by Karl Kautsky, use this classical conception to produce particular notions of socialist policy which I argue ultimately rely on a teleological notion of historical development. Later the Russian Marxists both extend and challenge the teleology and determinism of classical Marxian theory as they think about the nature of stages and the revolutionary transformation of societies. However, they frame what is innovative in their work within the boundaries bequeathed by Engels. In the final portion of this thesis I examine the consequences of the threads of the classical discourse on the construction of early "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union.

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This study explores the social and economic changes in the mid-Atlantic region generally, and Baltimore City and its hinterlands specifically, between the late colonial period and the dawn of the Jacksonian era. Baltimore foundered as a colonial entrepot until wheat emerged as an important export commodity in the 1740s. Between the mid-1740s and the 1770s, the town grew steadily within the British mercantilist world. its trade was deeply dependent on Atlantic commerce, its social structure reflected the mercantile orientation of the town and the staunchly deferential colonial household economy. The Revolution threatened to overturn this world with the promise of free trade and the possibility that the new republic could remake the Atlantic world, but this promise flickered out with the return of European mercantilist restrictions and hard times in the 1780s. Thereafter, merchants abandoned their revolutionary ambitions and re-established old commercial ties within the British Empire. Artisans sought to strengthen the ties that bound together workers to workshops in the colonial period, and preserve the deferential social order. Thus instead of making a clean break from the colonial to the early national after the war, Baltimore and the mid-Atlantic entered a postcolonial period in which merchants and artisans forged a neomercantilist mentalite to perpetuate much of the traditional social and economic order of colonial America.;The postcolonial period continued until the Bank of England suspended specie payments in 1797. This triggered a financial panic in the Atlantic world, and caused the return of hard times to Baltimore and the mid-Atlantic. Economic misfortune encouraged a reorientation of the town's social and economic life away from the Atlantic world and towards the backcountry and the frontier beyond. America thus moved from the postcolonial to the early national. After 1800, merchants and artisans sought to establish market ties to the backcountry by investing in manufactories, turnpike companies, banks, and western newspapers. These trends were accelerated by the Embargo of 1807, and by 1812, a nascent manufacturing class had emerged. This transformation came at a price. Without technological improvements to augment productivity, manufacturers achieved economies of scale by squeezing more labor from their workers, thus destroying the deferential bonds that held together the household economy and the colonial social order. The urban transition from workshop to manufactory was therefore chaotic, and eventually led to the Baltimore riots of 1812, the largest and most violent the country had ever witnessed.