Whilst in some financial systems in the early twentieth century commercial and investment banking activities were carried out by functionally separate firms, in others both kinds of operation were conducted under one roof by “universal banks”. Explaining the evolutionary paths that lead to...

Eyam is an epicentre of Europe’s plague heritage. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Derbyshire village, drawn by stories of its catastrophic plague and the heroic response it elicited. The story they are told - of a self-imposed quarantine preventing disease spreading to the...

The facts of social sciences are ones that stem from scientific expertise, but in the social world, everyone is their own expert. Everyone lives in society, and experiences either first-hand, or closely second-hand, the same phenomena that social scientists investigate. Consequently, people are...

For the purposes of calculation, context is irrelevant: one is expected to strip away the “contingent” details, slot bare numbers into the equations, and perform the relevant maths. Medical doctors must know this. So why, asked just such a question about the likelihood of a diagnostic test...

The impact that the francoist autarkic economic policy had on the Spanish economy is assessed using the Domestic Resource Cost (DRC) as an indicator. This indicator compares the real opportunity cost of the primary factors used in the production of a certain good with its aggregated value at...

This paper identifies four economic tendencies that shaped the development of the international recorded music industry since 1945: the importance of endogenous sunk costs led to a quality race; the fact that marginal revenue equalled marginal profit led to extreme vertical integration; the...

In John B. Calhoun’s early crowding experiments, rats were supplied with everything they needed – except space. The result was a population boom, followed by such severe psychological disruption that the animals died off to extinction. The take-home message was that crowding resulted in...

From 1945 to 1975, fifteen Western European countries passed school-leaving age laws that raised the number of years of compulsory schooling for the first time after the Second World War. In order to understand the driving forces behind the increase in compulsory schooling and to explain the...

Chronicling the history of science and health popularisation in the United States, John C. Burnham sees a decline from the Victorian “men of science” to a situation in the mid-1980s where what passed as the popularisation of science consisted of little more than a litany of unrelated facts....