This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier model to investigate the efficiency of Britain’s private railways during the period 1893-1912. We find that there was substantial inefficiency in the industry with no sign of reduction over time. Our main conclusion is that principal agent problems...

Dr Gordon Daniels, Reader in History at the University of Sheffield, presented his paper on the Social History of Occupied Japan at a one-day workshop on the Teaching of Japanese Economic and Social History, held at the Suntory-Toyota International Centre on 16 May 1990. We are grateful to Dr...

The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

It is standard in the literature on training to use wages as a sufficient statistic for productivity. But there are many reasons why wages and productivity may diverge. This paper is part of a smaller literature on the effects of work-related training on direct measures of productivity. We...

When the German translation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1860, it intensified a conflict that German theologians had been fighting since the early 19th century. Arguments against the secular relativising or even thorough dismissal of the scientific, philosophical and...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographical locations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private and public sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on the contrast between the strategies supported by the public and private sectors in governing...