Lee A. Craig - Böcker

Understanding the historical development of pensions is critical to the future of retirement systems around the world. A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States offers a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century. The authors emphasize how retirement plans can help achieve human resource objectives, how public sector pension policy has sometimes been influenced by other government objectives, and how early pension plans were funded.After discussing the economics of retirement plans, A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States reviews the history of European retirement plans, beginning with their use in the Roman Empire, and then moves on to early American pension systems. The authors explore the development and management of U.S. army and navy pension plans during the nineteenth century, drawing on original records of participants, retirees, and plan finances. They document the struggle to establish a federal civil service retirement system and trace the growth of state and local retirement plans. This history is inextricably linked to broader developments in U.S. financial markets, offering rich insights into political debates, including current debates surrounding plan design and plan funding.A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States will be of significant interest to financial market and pension experts, labor and corporate pension sponsors, policymakers, public sector plan participants, and others who want to know how and why pensions emerged.

The authors concentrate on the macroeconomic aspects of this integration, focusing on measures of aggregate output and monetary aggregates as they relate to policy concerns, such as those surrounding the implementation of the gold standard, as well as the possible interaction of nominal and real factors in both growth and cycles.

As a longtime leader of the Democratic Party and key member of Woodrow Wilson's cabinet, Josephus Daniels was one of the most influential progressive politicians in the country, and as secretary of the navy during the First World War, he became one of the most important men in the world. Before that, Daniels revolutionized the newspaper industry in the South, forever changing the relationship between politics and the news media. Lee A. Craig, an expert on economic history, delves into Daniels's extensive archive to inform this nuanced and eminently readable biography, following Daniels's rise to power in North Carolina and chronicling his influence on twentieth-century politics.A man of great contradictions, Daniels-an ardent prohibitionist, free trader, and Free Silverite-made a fortune in private industry yet served as a persistent critic of unregulated capitalism. He championed progressive causes like the graded public school movement and antitrust laws even as he led North Carolina's white supremacy movement. Craig pulls no punches in his definitive biography of this political powerhouse.

This comprehensive and far-reaching book describes the growth and economic integration of the European economy from 1500 to 1913. The authors apply macroeconomic techniques to identify growth rates, inflation, product markets, trade networks and business cycles across a set of countries over the period. The book demonstrates that growth was the natural state for European economies throughout the period although, under the impetus of the industrial revolution, growth rates generally accelerated by the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, business cycles in the modern sense seem to have been in evidence at the beginning of the period but by the eighteenth century there is no doubt that modern cycles affected these countries, sometimes simultaneously. Inflationary episodes are both distinct and shared in this long period, with the long inflation of the sixteenth century attesting to the integration of European markets. Finally, the authors find abundant quantitative evidence to support the argument that economies linked by international trade in 1500 came close to achieving global integration by 1913.The European Macroeconomy will be of interest to scholars of economic history, international economics and macroeconomics.

State and Local Retirement Plans in the United States explains how economic and political events have shaped the development of pension plans in the last century, and it argues that changes in the structure and generosity of these plans will continue to shape policy and funding in the future. It also brings to bear a new rationale to the policies behind public sector pension plans. The authors use the history of how early public pension plans were established, how they matured and how they have grown in generosity to analyse what changes may be expected in years to come. Unique in its scope, this comprehensive history of the development of public sector pension plans in the United States during the twentieth century expands upon current ideas relating to the changing economic environment, the passage and evolution of social security and the expansion of the public sector. With the exception of military pension plans, which date from the eighteenth century, the first public sector plans, dating from the late nineteenth century, were established to cover teachers, police officers and firefighters in large cities. Over time, these retirement plans were extended to other public sector workers and the local plans were often merged with plans for state workers; all of these date from the twentieth century. Here, the authors show just how pension coverage for public sector workers expanded steadily, through the first half of the twentieth century, so that by the 1960s the vast majority of public sector workers were covered by a plan. This analysis demonstrates how economic events and shifts in public policy at the federal, state and local levels helped to shape public sector retirement plans. The authors also compare public plans with private sector plans, and the final chapter focuses on recent changes in public pensions in response to the `Great Recession', concurrent sharp declines in equity markets and the aging of the public workforce. Scholars and students of economics, history and public policy, public administrators, policymakers and all those with an interest in policy development will find the analyses discussed and conclusions drawn here of significance.