This introductory piece provides some context to the special edition on business and economic history of Chile and Latin America. It also provides an introduction to better understanding research and method in business history while inviting for this field to be further developed in Chile.

Kingdom of Nokia tells a fascinating story of corporatism in Finland. How did the mobile phone giant Nokia make the Finnish elite willing to serve the interests of the company? Nokia became a global player in mobile communications in the 1990s, and helped establish Anglo-Saxon capitalism in...

It is argued that government credibility is an important resource and that it can be improved by delegating decision-making competence beyond the nation-state. It is hypothesized that such delegation should result in higher income and growth. Some former British colonies retained the Judicial...

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

This is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric. This literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the...

This chapter discusses the strong impact of economic forces, and changes in the economic environment, on American Jewish observance and American Jewish religious institutions in the 20th century. Beginning with the immigrants' experience of dramatic economic change between the old country and...

In this paper we present a new long-term database on monthly export and import series for 23 economies during 1921-2010 and its first empirical application. Using these data, we analyse the synchronised decline in foreign trade during the recession 2008-09 in a historical perspective. We...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

Literature on convergence among Latin American countries is still scarce compared to other regions. Almost none of the research connects convergence to the economic history of Latin America and the usual finding is one speed of convergence assuming one globally stable steady-state. In this paper...

Die Rolle der Hochschulen im Innovationssystem sowohl der BRD als auch der DDR hat sich in den letzten fünfzig Jahren zum Teil dramatisch geändert. Der Veränderungsprozess in der Bundesrepublik lässt sich grob in drei Phasen einteilen, die sich zwar überlappen, dennoch im wesentlichen eine...