Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this paper examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. This implies that ownership...

In Against the gods: the remarkable story of risk (1996), Peter L. Bernstein illustrates how the mastery of risk has driven modern Western society into converting 'the future from an enemy into an opportunity'. Far from being an antagonist, as the unpredictable whim of gods or mysterious fate,...

This paper introduces the Data Collection Task Force of the South-East European Monetary History Network (SEEMHN DCTF) and its first result. Good policy making should be grounded on good data. To this end, the SEEMHN DCTF works since 2006 towards establishing a SEE macro history database of 19th...

This paper provides a political economy perspective on gold standard adoption in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which joined the monetary system in midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the high relative costs faced by a peripheral country like...

How sticky were wages during the Great Depression? Although classic accounts emphasize the importance of nominal rigidity in amplifying deflationary shocks, the evidence is limited. In this paper, I calculate the degree of nominal wage rigidity in the United Kingdom between the wars using new...