This paper studies the way workers and firms behaved in a highly cyclical sector such as the cotton textile industry, which encompassed 1/5 of the Catalan industrial workforce in the early 20th century. Using firm level evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the paper shows that,...

Der Begriff „Wachstum“ gehört zu den schillernden Schlagwörtern des politischen Alltags.2 Wachstum ist gut, und vieles scheint in Gefahr, wenn Wachstum ausbleibt. So führt Bundeskanzlerin Merkel in ihrer Regierungserklärung vom 10. November 2009 zum Beginn der neuen Legislaturperiode...

The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...

In many practical cases one has to choose an arrangement of different objects so that they are compatible. Whenever the compatibility of the objects can be checked by a pair-wise comparison the problem can be moddeled using the graph-theoretic notion of cliques.

Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textilefirm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assignedteammates affect an individual worker’s behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme,and b) how such effects...

This exploratory paper investigates why some companies appear to find successful business relationshipsrelatively effortless. It seems that the organisation’s search for and utilisation of key resources canguarantee its success in the market place. The paper incorporates a critique of...

New data on individual worker’s outputs show that New England ring spinners exhibited substantial on the job learning c. 1905. Despite this, variable capital-labour ratios meant high labour turnover reduced aggregate labour productivity only fractionally. The combination of variable...