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on Business, Economic and Financial History |
|
Issue of 2010‒06‒11
twenty-two papers chosen by |
| By: | Nikolay Nenovsky |
| Abstract: | The 1870s have always held a special attraction for specialists in the history of thought. For economic theory these are the years of the Great Crossroads when economic theory was at critical breaking point, after which several powerful theoretical streams emerged that were to determine later on the overall course of the evolution of economics. The book by the French economist and philosopher Gilles Campagnolo is an attempt to find out exactly what happened in the years of the Great Crossroads. It offers not only factual and historical reading, but also theoretical interpretation to explaining the evolution, mutual influence and int ermingling of the above individual schools of thought in the economic science. The present paper is a review essay on Gilles Campagnolo’s new book. |
| Keywords: | history of economic thought, Austrian analysis |
| JEL: | B10 B40 |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:10-2010&r=his |
| By: | Robert Leonard |
| Abstract: | From the perspective of science, art and intellectual life in general, Interwar Vienna was one of the most vibrant communities in modern European history. Within the field of economics, it was home to, amongst others, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Hans Mayer, Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Karl Menger and Abraham Wald. The community flourished after the end of World War I, and then began to suffer in the early 1930’s as a result of growing political instability and rising anti-semitism. With the Anschluss of Austria by the Third Reich in March 1938, it collapsed completely, never to recover. Drawing on the personal papers of two key participants, Oskar Morgenstern and Karl Menger, and also on the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, this paper provides a portrait of that community, chronicling its evolution and dramatic collapse. Particular attention is paid to the milieu surrounding Morgenstern, both as director of the Rockefeller-funded Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research and as philosophical “dissident”. In collaborating with mathematicians Menger, Wald and, later, John von Neumann, he gradually forsook his Austrian theoretical legacy. The account detailed here shows conflict and tension to have been central to both the life and death of this fabled community. |
| Date: | 2010–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:04-2010&r=his |
| By: | Pierre-Yves DONZÉ (Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University) |
| Abstract: | This paper focuses on the involvement of Siemens on the market for radiology equipment in Japan between 1900 and 1960 from a business history perspective. It explores why the German multinational was unable to keep its dominant position on the Japanese market in the interwar years, despite its technological competitiveness. In particular, it examines the strategic choices made by the firm (export, licensing, direct investment) in relation to the changing economic and technological environment, highlighting the importance, for foreign multinationals, of working together with national trading firms involved in the distribution of drugs and products for doctors, as the Japanese medical market was already well structured when the country opened up to the West. Four phases have been identified. At first, before World War I, German manufacturers of X-ray machines, especially Siemens, enjoyed a virtual monopoly in Japan and favored an export strategy. The political and technological shifts that occurred during the war (interruption of trade with Germany, development of the Coolidge X-ray tube by General Electric) led to a more competitive market in Japan. Siemens reorganized its involvement in this business via a contract signed with a domestic medical goods trade company, Goto Fuundo (1926). Yet this proved insufficient to overcome the competition, and Siemens finally decided to relocate some of its production facilities for X-ray machines in Japan by entering into a joint venture with Goto (1932). Relations between Siemens and Goto were severed by the war, and Goto tried until the 1950s to go it alone in this field but failed due to a lack of organizational capability. As for Siemens, it reverted to its export strategy approach, re-entering the market in the 1950s. |
| Keywords: | Siemens, Goto Fuundo, X-ray machines, medical market |
| JEL: | F23 N85 O32 |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osk:wpaper:1017&r=his |
| By: | Sebastian Braun; Michael Kvasnicka |
| Abstract: | Woman suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Yet, women neither won the right to vote by force, nor did men grant it under the imminent threat of female unrest. These facts are difficult to reconcile with leading political economy theories of suffrage extensions. In this paper, we study suffrage extensions at the level of US states and territories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to learn about the factors that accelerated, respectively delayed, a jurisdiction's transition to woman suffrage. Our results show that the general scarcity of women in the American West, or a high sex ratio, was the single most important factor behind the region's lead in the enfranchisement of women in the US. High ratios of grantors (men) to grantees (women) of the franchise appear to have promoted earlier suffrage extensions, as these imbalances reduced the political costs and risks for male legislators and electorates. Our finding may provide a more general insight into the economics of voluntary power sharing. All else equal, smaller groups should find it much easier to acquire rights or to get admitted to economic and political clubs |
| Keywords: | Woman Suffrage; Democratization; Political Economy; Power Sharing; Sex Ratio |
| JEL: | D72 J16 K10 N41 N42 |
| Date: | 2010–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kie:kieliw:1625&r=his |
| By: | Federico Barbiellini Amidei (Bank of Italy, Structural Economic Analysis Department); Andrea Goldstein (OECD); Marcella Spadoni (Università di Torino) |
| Abstract: | While Italy's catch-up in the course of the 20th century has been nothing short of extraordinary, it has failed to produce a large number of global business players. Nonetheless, half a century ago an Italian company concluded what was at the time the largest-ever foreign takeover of a US company. The paper analyzes the Olivetti's acquisition of Underwood and frames it in the broader picture of the literature on the management and performance of foreign companies in the United States. We provide a historical narrative focused on three main issues: 1) head office control and subsidiary autonomy; 2) Olivetti's adaptation to the American business system; 3) the development of internal knowledge resources within the subsidiary. Lessons and implications are relevant for business historians and management scholars in general. |
| Keywords: | FDI, acquisition, control, adaptation, knowledge resources, Olivetti, Underwood |
| JEL: | L11 M4 N60 N80 F23 |
| Date: | 2010–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:workqs:qse_2&r=his |
| By: | José Miguel Martínez-Carrión (Applied Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Business (Universidad de Murcia). Campus Espinardo, 30100, Espinardo (Murcia, Spain)); Francisco José Medina-Albaladejo (Applied Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Business (Universidad de Murcia). Campus Espinardo, 30100, Espinardo (Murcia, Spain)) |
| Abstract: | In recent years the European winegrowing regions have been carrying out deep changes in response to increasing international competition, outstanding the case of Spain. This study analyses the main sequences of changes the Spanish wine industry has undergone: the evolution of consumption; the role of exports; the spread of marketing and business organization; the factors that have been involved in the modernization of the wineries. An initial valuation leads us to conclude that it has been an authentic wine revolution in reference to the transformations that have occurred in a period of farming changes and technological modernization for the businesses |
| Keywords: | Wine industry revolution, technological modernization, enological change, Spain, twentieth century. |
| JEL: | N54 O33 Q13 L66 |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1006&r=his |
| By: | Bart J. Wilson (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University); Taylor Jaworski (Department of Economics, University of Arizona); Karl Schurter (Department of Economics, University of Virginia); Andrew Smyth (Department of Economics, Florida State University) |
| Abstract: | This paper uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th century developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their prey, the primary implication being that different ecological conditions lead to different rules of capture. Holding everything else constant, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely that the members of the community are civil-minded. |
| Keywords: | property rights, endogenous rules, whaling, experimental economics |
| JEL: | C92 D23 K11 N50 |
| Date: | 2010–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:10-12&r=his |
| By: | Divino, Jose Angelo; Teles, Vladimir Kuhl; Pinto De Andrade, Joaquim |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis of long-run purchasingpower parity (PPP) for all Latin American countries. These countries sharesimilar economic history and contagious effects from currency crises, whichmight lead to comovements in their real exchange rates. New time series unitroot tests found evidence of PPP for the vast majority of countries. In thepanel data framework, tests for the null of unit root, null of stationarity, andunit root under multiple structural breaks indicated stationary real exchangerates. Thus, there is convincing evidence that PPP holds for Latin-Americancountries in the post-1980 period. |
| Date: | 2010–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fgv:eesptd:227&r=his |
| By: | Noel Maurer (Harvard Business School, Business, Government and the International Economy Unit) |
| Abstract: | The Mexican expropriation of 1938 was the first large-scale non-Communist expropriation of foreign-owned natural resource assets. The literature generally makes three assertions: the U.S. government did not fully back the companies, Mexico did not fully compensate them for the value of their assets, and the oil workers benefitted from the change in ownership. This paper musters data and evidence that supports only the first of those assertions, and only to a limited extent: the companies devised political strategies that maneuvered Roosevelt into supporting their interests, and they were more than fully compensated by the Mexican government as a result. |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hbs:wpaper:10-108&r=his |
| By: | Sergio Espuelas-Barroso (Universitat de Barcelona) |
| Abstract: | Most of the studies about the welfare state have focused so far on the affluent democracies. However, poorer and non-democratic countries have deserved less attention. This paper provides new evidence on the evolution of social spending in both Spain and Portugal between 1950 and 1980. Since both of them were dictatorships throughout almost the whole period, that new evidence allows us to study the relationship between dictatorships and redistribution. In addition to the level of social spending and its distribution among different items, the way in which social spending is financed is also analyzed in this paper. More exactly, the ratio of social security contributions to social spending is used as an indicator of redistribution. The main findings of this paper show that besides economic and demographic factors (as the level of GDP and the ageing of population) political factors are key determinants of social spending and the way in which it is funded. During the time-period 1950-80 dictatorships had a negative effect on social spending, and were more prone to finance social protection via social contributions, which did not imply redistribution through government budgets. Therefore, in contrast to the political legitimacy theories and those theories neglecting the role played by political factors, we find that (at least in the southern-European periphery) dictatorships were less redistributive than democracies. On the other hand, this papers findings also suggest that, rather than provoking a race to the bottom or an increase in social spending levels, globalization favored the adoption of tax-funded systems instead of contributory programs. |
| Keywords: | dictatorships, public social spending, welfare state, public economics, comparative economic history, redistribution |
| JEL: | D6 I00 N34 N44 H5 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bar:bedcje:2010240&r=his |
| By: | Thomas Piketty |
| Abstract: | This paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20%-25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation, growth and inheritance can fully account for the observed U-shaped pattern and levels. Using this model, we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20%-25% of national income by 2050. This corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100%. Our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small, and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate (say, r=4%-5% vs g=1%-2%), which was the case in the 19<sup>th</sup> century and early 20th century and is likely to happen again in the 21st century, then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality. Contrarily to a widely spread view, modern economic growth did not kill inheritance. |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pse:psecon:2010-12&r=his |
| By: | Nillesen, Eleonora; Verwim, Philip |
| Abstract: | This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. Macro-economic evidence on economic legacies of civil war suggests that civil wars, while obviously disastrous in the short run, do not |
| Keywords: | Civil war, investment, post-traumatic growth |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp2010-44&r=his |
| By: | Bruszt, Laszlo; Campos, Nauro F.; Fidrmuc, Jan |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of |
| Keywords: | civil society, institutions, economic reform, democratization |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp2010-38&r=his |
| By: | Jan Kregel |
| Abstract: | The current financial crisis has been characterized as a "Minsky" moment, and as such provides the conditions required for a reregulation of the financial system similar to that of the New Deal banking reforms of the 1930s. However, Minsky's theory was not one that dealt in moments but rather in systemic, structural changes in the operations of financial institutions. Therefore, the framework for reregulation must start with an understanding of the longer-term systemic changes that took place between the New Deal reforms and their formal repeal under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act. This paper attempts to identify some of those changes and their sources. In particular, it notes that the New Deal reforms were eroded by an internal process in which commercial banks that were given a monopoly position in deposit taking sought to remove those protections because unregulated banks were able to provide substitute instruments that were more efficient and unregulated but unavailable to regulated banks, since they involved securities market activities that would eventually be recognized as securitization. Regulators and the courts contributed to this process by progressively ruling that these activities were related to the regulated activities of the commercial banks, allowing them to reclaim securities market activities that had been precluded in the New Deal legislation. The 1999 Act simply made official the de facto repeal of the 1930s protections. Any attempt to provide reregulation of the system will thus require safeguards to ensure that this internal process of deregulation is not repeated. |
| Keywords: | Financial Regulation; Financial Crisis; Subprime Crisis; Mortgage Affiliate Regulation; Financial Legislation; Supreme Court and Financial Deregulation |
| JEL: | G21 G24 G28 |
| Date: | 2010–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_586&r=his |
| By: | Marta Curto-Grau (Universitat de Barcelona); Alfonso Herranz-Loncán (Universitat de Barcelona); Albert Solé-Ollé (Universitat de Barcelona) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the extent to which the public allocation of road investment was influenced by political and electoral goals during the Spanish Restoration (1874-1923). More precisely, we seek to identify those provinces that were favoured with higher road construction expenditure and whether tactical strategies adopted by the political parties varied over time to reflect increasing political competition. In so doing, this paper combines concepts from three strands of literature: legislative pork-barrel; clientelism and machine politics; and electoral competition. Our main empirical finding for a panel of Spain’s provinces suggests that constituencies electing a higher proportion of deputies from minority or opposition parties were initially punished through lower levels of road investment but that, by the end of the period, they were instead favoured with more resources than the rest. In addition, we also observe that senior deputies who had been ministers in previous administrations were more capable than other politicians of attracting resources to their constituencies |
| Keywords: | Road investment, distributive politics, electoral competition, vote buying |
| JEL: | H54 P16 D72 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:2010/6/doc2010-22&r=his |
| By: | Daniel Gordon; Rögnvaldur Hannesson |
| Abstract: | In the early 1970s, the herring stocks in the Northeast Atlantic were nearly fished to extinction. This collapse is usually attributed to technological advances in the fishery, particularly the introduction of the echo sounder and the power block. In this paper we investigate the empirical impact of technological shocks on herring stocks. An ARMAX model shows significant evidence that, in fact, the power block was the principal factor in the demise of the herring stock. In addition, we look at the sensitivity of catch due to stock size and technological shocks. We observe evidence that prior to 1960 stock levels had little impact on revenue, however, after 1960 we measure a strong positive impact of stock on catch per unit effort. We are not able to explain this apparent anomaly, but technology shocks seem to have made the catch per unit effort less sensitive to the stock size. |
| Date: | 2010–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:clg:wpaper:2010-13&r=his |
| By: | Nikolay Nenovsky |
| Abstract: | In this paper, I will try to address some criticism to Bruno Leoni’s general theory of law and society. In his well known book Freedom and the Law (1961) –in the opinion of some Italian scholars, to be considered a libertarian Manifesto–, he stressed at least five main points: i) legislation is incompatible with the long-run certainty of the law, that is when the law is not properly the result of the exercise of the arbitrary will of particular men; ii) courts of justice describe or discover the law, and do not make the law; iii) courts cannot be considered as legislators, not only because of their psychological attitude towards the law, which they discover, and do not create, but above all because of their fundamental dependance on the parties concerned in their process of making the law: so, a court must not be allowed to reverse its precedents – at least to a certain extent; iv) the whole process, and so the law, can be described as a sort of vast, continuous, and chiefly spontaneous collaboration between the judges and the judged in order to discover what the people’s will is in a series of definite instances –a collaboration that in many respects may be compared to that existing among all the partecipants in a free market; v) in our time, the mechanism of the judiciary in certain countries where supreme courts are established results in the imposition of the personal views of the members of these courts, or of a majority of them: it is a somewhat contradictory introduction of the legislative process under the deceptive label of lawyers’ or judiciary law at its highest stage. It seems to me that Leoni’s theory of law and society as a normative doctrine for a «libertarian», or «post-hayekian», society is not entirely successful: in particular, topics as the relation between law and legislation, the proper sense of legal concepts (if any), and the possibility to survive for individual freedom as a non-historical but ideological concept within an open, i.e. democratic , society, will be put under scrutiny in the paper, according to Leoni’s doctrine of law as an individual claim |
| Keywords: | history of economic and social thought, Russia |
| JEL: | B00 B41 |
| Date: | 2010–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:02-2010&r=his |
| By: | Suri Ratnapala |
| Abstract: | In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith set out his influential theory that societies achieve prosperity by securing the freedom of individuals to pursue their own end by the means they choose within a framework of rules of justice. In his earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith developed his thesis about the origins of our moral sentiments and the emergence of rules of justice. The socalled ‘Adam Smith Problem’ concerns the perceived inconsistency between Smith’s defence of selfinterest in the Wealth of Nations and his emphasis of sympathy as the origin of moral sentiments in the earlier work. The existence of the ‘Adam Smith Problem’ has been contested by many writers. The present author provides a number of new arguments to demonstrate the illusory nature of the problem by revisiting the key elements Smith’s moral theory. The author argues that the problem dissolves when the role of justice in providing the conditions of free trade is understood. Smith’s tirade against wealth worship is explained as part of his defence of justice and not a condemnation of wealth accumulation. According to this reading, the Theory of Moral Sentiments is a powerful statement of the moral basis of capitalism. |
| Date: | 2010–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:05-2010&r=his |
| By: | Stephen B. DeLoach (Department of Economics, Elon University); Thomas Tiemann (Department of Economics, Elon University) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates recent commuting trends in American workers. Unlike most studies of commuting that rely on Census data, this study utilizes the unique American Time Use Survey to detail the complex commuting patterns of modern-day workers. The data confirm what has been suspected, that incidence of driving alone has decreased substantially in recent years while carpooling has rebounded. The results from the multi-nominal logistic estimation of workersÕ commuting choices yield support for both the traditional economic determinants as well as for the newer, socio-economic factors. In addition to the cost savings, many commuters appear to value the social aspect of carpooling. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that the need for autonomy plays much of a factor in explaining workerÕs choice of the journey to work. The estimated short-run ÒelasticityÓ of carpooling with respect to real gas prices appears to be quite high and largely accounts for the significant decline in the incidence of Òdriving aloneÓ. |
| Keywords: | Ride sharing, carpooling, commuting, gasoline process, social capital |
| JEL: | R4 |
| Date: | 2010–03–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:elo:wpaper:2010-01&r=his |
| By: | Ishita Chakravarty (Centre for Economic and Social Studies) |
| Abstract: | Research on women's work has attempted to analyse how the interplay of market and patriarchy leads women and men to perform different economic roles in society. This segregation on the basis of gender or the sex-typing of work plays an important role both from the demand and supply sides in determining the work profiles of women and girl children. The present study attempts to see how a particular labour market, i.e. domestic service, a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in post partition West Bengal (WB) and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. We have argued that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independence WB accompanied by large scale immigration of women, men and children from the bordering East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, led to an unprecedented increase in labour force under conditions of stagnant investment. This in turn led to a decline in the wage rate. In such a situation poor refugee women in their frantic search for means of survival gradually drove out the males of the host population engaged in domestic service in urban WB by offering to work in return for a very low and often for no wage at all. Again, poor males from the neighboring states of Bihar, Orissa and UP constituted historically a substantial section of the Calcutta labour market and many of them were employed as domestics in a state known for its prevalence of domestic service in colonial India. The replacement of male domestics by females was further facilitated by the gradual decline in inter-state migration due to lack of employment opportunities in independent WB. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service in urban WB was arguably set by the migrating girl children from the rural areas of the state to Calcutta city in search for employment between 1971 and 1981. |
| Keywords: | gender roles, labour supply, labour demand, India |
| JEL: | J00 J16 J20 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eab:laborw:2200&r=his |
| By: | Oscar Bajo-Rubio (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha); Carmen Díaz-Roldán (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha); Vicente Esteve (Universidad de Valencia y Universidad de La Laguna) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we provide a test of the sustainability of the Spanish government deficit over the period 1850-2000, and examine the role played by monetary and fiscal dominance in order to get fiscal solvency. The longer than usual span of the data would allow us to obtain some more robust results on the fulfilling of the intertemporal budget constraint than in most of previous analyses. First, we analyze the relationship between primary surplus and debt, following the recent critique of Bohn (2007), and investigate the possibility of structural changes occurring along the period by means of the new approach of Kejriwal and Perron (2008). The analysis is complemented in two directions: (i) performing Granger-causality tests in order to distinguish properly between a fiscal dominant and a monetary dominant regime; and (ii) presenting the impulse-response functions of debt to innovations in the primary surplus, through the approach of Canzoneri, Cumby and Diba (2001). |
| Keywords: | Fiscal policy, Sustainability, Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, Monetary dominance, Fiscal dominance. |
| JEL: | E62 H62 |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aee:wpaper:1004&r=his |
| By: | B. CLARYSSE; S. MOSEY; I. LAMBRECHT; |
| Abstract: | In the nineties, postgraduate technology management education was mainly concentrated upon structuring the product development cycle and positioning technology strategy within the overall strategy of the company. Today it encompasses a much wider range of capabilities to address contemporary challenges such as globalization, open innovation, and the need for corporate renewal and venturing. To gain insight into the implications of this change, we conducted a number of exploratory interviews with leaders from both the demand and supply sides in Europe based in higher education institutes, the corporate sector, and public institutes. Our interviews highlight a dynamic field moving from traditional MBA-focused programs toward more entrepreneurial “boot camps,” from a case study-oriented teaching style toward a mentoring approach, and from an emphasis upon general business toward working across disciplines yet being sensitive to underlying technologies. We found important implications for technology management education with respect to its location within universities and identified opportunities for business schools to provide technology entrepreneurship and commercialization skills. |
| Date: | 2010–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rug:rugwps:10/647&r=his |