Three decades ago, and with very few precedents, Spain's two principal banking corporations began an intense process of expansion throughout Latin America. Not only did they compete with one other in this new market, but they also faced competition from domestic Latin American banks and other...

How sticky were wages during the Great Depression? Although classic accounts emphasize the importance of nominal rigidity in amplifying deflationary shocks, the evidence is limited. In this paper, I calculate the degree of nominal wage rigidity in the United Kingdom between the wars using new...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

In this paper, we use new historical data on the most popular stocks traded at the Istanbul bourse between 1910 and 1914, to examine the effect of wars on stock market prices. During this period, the Ottoman Empire was involved in the Turco-Italian and the Balkan wars, leading to massive land...

This contribution offers a comparison between the economic crises of the late-1920s and the first energy crisis of the 1970s through an inquiry into the changing balance between the transnational supply of capital and domestic aggregate demand for fixed capital formation and consumer goods. Its...

Following the collapse of the bubble economy in Japan, banking supervisors and bank examiners were severely criticized by the media as human capital had long been viewed the key element of Japanese banking supervision. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the bank supervisors ́career paths...

In 1965 Sidney Pollard published The Genesis of Modern Management, an extended discussion of the problems, during Britain's initial period of industrialisation, of the 'internal management' of the firm. But, in his focus on industry, Pollard ignored one of the largest, most significant and most...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

I present a theory to account for the emergence of land rights in a subsistence agricultural economy. An important feature is that, to maximize tax revenue, an authoritarian state must devise land rights to overcome the informational constraint in registering the population for tax collection....

This paper provides a political economy perspective on gold standard adoption in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which joined the monetary system in midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the high relative costs faced by a peripheral country like...