How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, I collect archival data from colonial India and use it to estimate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by six predictions from a general...

This paper provides a comprehensive description of the financial environment for households and small businesses in a defined geographical region. It develops a new, functional approach to financial access surveys, which involves asking detailed questions about how respondents meet their...

The diffusion of manufacturing supply chains worldwide has provoked a fierce debate over how to effectively monitor and promote compliance with labor standards in supply chain factories (Frenkle and Scott 2002; Fung, O’Rourke, and Sabel 2001; O’Rouke 2003; Weil 1996). In this paper we aim to identify...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...

This article deals with the concept of market information. In particular, it argues that references to the so-called conduit metaphor, which represents markets as a series of information flows, hide the localized, historically contingent and materially mediated practices of the economy....

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the evolving relationship between the British trading company John Swire and Sons and its Chinese partners involved in the distribution of its products, notably sugar. From the nineteenth century, Swire had utilised the Chinese system of the Comprador....

This paper addresses two related issues: the effect of the `regulatory shock' of the National Minimum Wage on small firms and the consequent effects on the commonly observed practice of 'informality', It draws on a survey of such firms but primarily uses case study evidence from five firms to...

Irving Fisher wrote a significant number of papers towards the end of his career on the design of the U.S. tax system. These writings culminated in a book that lie wrote with his brother Herbert in 1942. Fisher thought that the double taxation of saving under an income tax was extremely harmful...

This paper examines workplace restructuring in three department stores in the Czech Republic in early 1994. All had previously belonged to the state-owned store chain of Czechoslovakia; one which we call Shop, was a major Prague store still in state ownership at the time of research, although it...

The Black-Scholes-Merton formula has been put to widespread use by options traders because it provides a means of calculating the theoretically 'correct' price of stock options. Traders can therefore see whether the market price of stock options undervalues or overvalues them compared with their...