This paper examines major privately-owned British railway companies before World War I. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed, total factor productivity growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographicallocations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private andpublic sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on thecontrast between the strategies supported by the public and privatesectors in governing bioinformatic...

As correctly noted by Matthew Drennan in his paper forthis conference, the nature of the transformation that hasoccurred in the New York metropolitan region since 1989is rather mixed. Although the region has regained onlyhalf of the 625,000 jobs it lost during the 1989-92 period,aggregate...

Recent empirical studies claim to have identified roots of Africa’s poverty in its colonial past, particularly in the ‘extractive’ or ‘illegitimate’ institutions that the colonial powers bequeathed. While taking a similar quantitative approach this paper accepts the view of many...

This paper considers the 1990s in the context of long run economic growth performance. Growth in the context of this paper should be understood to comprise the growth of real living standards as well as real GDP per person. There were a number of new experiences during the decade that were...

Although industrial production and growth in Greece during the interwar periodhas attracted considerable attention, there has not been any serious challengeeither in qualitative or quantitative terms to the orthodoxy established in theperiod itself. The literature usually sees the 1920s as a...

The current landscape of Global History literature appears dominated by a rather asymmetrical dichotomy between Eurocentric analyses of the cumulative emergence of the West and global history which reduces the significance of this transition by blending it into very long-term perspectives. This...

We present a theoretical framework and empirical strategy to measure the causal effect ofinterim feedback on individuals’ performance. Our identification strategy exploits a naturalexperiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically differentrules on the...

This paper uses data on elected village councils in South India to examinethe political economy of public resource allocation. We find that the patternof policy-making reflects politicians' self-interest. Elected councillors benefit from improved personal access to public resources. In addition,...

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate inIndian states has affected the pattern of manufacturing growthin the period 1958-92. We show that states which ammendedthe Industrial Disputes Act in a pro-worker direction experiencedlowered output, employment, investment and...