This paper investigates the effect of early twentieth-century state maximum-hours laws on the employment of women in manufacturing. Maximum-hours laws are found to have reduced not only women's hours of work in 1920 but their employment as well. Further, the effect was not uniform by race and nativity: While the employment of foreign-born women was significantly reduced--by as much as 30 percent in the most restrictive states--the employment of native white women was largely unaffected. This and other evidence adduced in the paper suggest that early support for maximum-hours legislation for women, especially by the emerging American labor movement, may have been motivated in part by the well-documented hostility to immigration during this period.

This paper provides one of the few successful demonstrations of the efficiency of certain types of restrictions in the context of a joint venture. The joint venture we examine is the National Hockey League (NHL) in the 1980s, which was then composed of 21 separately owned teams. (It now has 30 teams.) The restriction we analyze is the NHL rule on franchise relocation. Before one can fully understand the effect of the restriction, one must understand the theory of how sports leagues operate and whether sports leagues have any market power that can be enhanced by such a restriction. After providing such a theory, we empirically test the effect of the NHL restriction on franchise relocation. Aside from data availability, the advantage of our time period is that television was then an unimportant source of revenue for the NHL. Thus we are able to isolate a particular externality arising from how the NHL finances teams.

This paper focuses on the causes of marital instability. Section I develops a theoretical analysis of marital dissolution, incorporating uncertainty about outcomes of marital decisions into a framework of utility maximization and the marriage market. Section II explores implications of the theoretical analysis with cross-sectional data, primarily the 1967 Survey of Economic Opportunity and the Terman sample. The relevance of both the theoretical and empirical analyses in explaining the recent acceleration in divorce rates is also discussed.