We examine the strategies interwar working-class British households used to “smooth” consumption over time and guard against negative contingencies such as illness, unemployment, and death. Newly discovered returns from the U.K. Ministry of Labour's 1937/38 Household Expenditure Survey are...

Department stores represented one of the most advertising-intensive sectors of American interwar retailing. Yet it has been argued that a competitive spiral of high advertising spending, to match the challenge of other local department stores, contributed to an inflation of operating costs that...

Promotional activity proved key to the success of department stores in fending off competition from the expanding chain stores by drawing in customers to their large, central, premises. This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative archival data to examine the promotional methods...

Department stores represented one of the most advertising-intensive sectors of American inter-war retailing. Yet it has been argued that a competitive spiral of high advertising spending, to match the challenge of other local department stores, contributed to a damaging inflation of costs that...

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility--gas--was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution...

Individual attitudes towards multinational enterprises (MNEs) remains relatively understudied compared to individual attitudes towards other dimensions of globalization, particularly trade and immigration. In order to illuminate individual attitudes towards MNEs, this paper utilizes a large...

This study examines if and how gender relates to research evaluation via panel assessment and journal ratings lists. Using data from UK business schools we find no evidence that the proportion of women in a submission for panel assessment affected the score received by the submitting...

We investigate how competition affected the survival of products in the UK automobile market between 1971 and 2002. We find, after using a host of controls to account for product characteristics and changes in market structure, that (i) within and between firm spatial competition significantly...