The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous...

The paper offers a new perspective on the management and accounting practices at this pioneering firm of the British industrial revolution. Using a historical materialist approach, it offers an alternative to the economic rationalist, Foucauldian and Marxist explanations in the prior literature....

The paper sets out a theoretical model linking stock market financial risk to labour market conditions, including labour intensity and the risk arising from the specification of labour contracts. A value added analysis is conducted combining national and firm level accounts data to examine the...

The paper examines the determinants of corporate social disclosure (CSD) using a sample drawn from environmentally sensitive industries. It extends the traditional literature in two respects. First, it is international in scope, examining the accounting disclosure responses of multi-national...

The joint stock company, centred on Oldham, is a central narrative in Douglas Farnie’s seminal book, the English Cotton Industry and the World Market. Farnie was the first to highlight the idiosyncratic nature of these limited companies, including their highly democratic system of governance....

The paper reinterprets Keynes’s analysis of the crisis in the Lancashire cotton industry in the 1920s. It presents empirical evidence showing that syndicates of local shareholders, but not the banks, were an important brake on firms exiting, at a time when exit barriers were otherwise...

The paper introduces the notion of different methods of calculating and analysing profitability as signatures of capitalism at different stages of development. Interactions between the development of the productive forces and the socialisation of capital ownership jointly impact on these...

The refinancing of PFI (Private Finance Initiative) projects currently represents one of the most contentious aspects of Public Private Partnership in the UK. The negative publicity associated with UK PFI refinancing deals is associated with two main factors, namely evidence of massive private...

The paper argues that the principal components of the Resource- based view (R-BV) of the firm are not a sufficient basis for a complete and consistent theory of firm behaviour. Two important missing elements are governance arrangements and value theory. Whilst these missing elements have been...

[First Paragraphs] As political history is signposted by decisive battles and the rise and fall of great leaders, so the history of finance is marked by speculative booms and busts. From the failure of the futures market in Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, to the South Sea Bubble of...