Flight‐to‐safety and the credit crunch: a new history of the banking crises in France during the Great Depression†

Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale of the French banking crises of 1930–1 and their consequences have never been fully assessed quantitatively. The lack of banking regulation severely limited the availability of balance sheet data. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 300 banks, this article shows that the crises were much more severe than previously thought, although they did not affect the main commercial banks. By reconstructing financial flows, this study shows that the fall in bank credit was mostly driven by a flight‐to‐safety by deposits, from banks to savings institutions and the central bank. The decrease in bank deposits due to bank runs was offset by an increase in deposits with savings institutions, with the central bank, and in cash hoarding, whereas the decrease in bank credit was not offset by an increase in loans from non‐bank financial institutions. In line with the gold standard mentality, cash deposited with savings institutions and the central bank was used to decrease marketable public debt and increase gold reserves, rather than pursuing countercyclical policies. Despite massive capital inflows and rising aggregate money supply, France suffered from a severe, persistent credit crunch.     

Does educational diversity of managers matter for the performance of team‐managed funds?

We study the effect of the educational diversity of managers on the performance of team‐managed mutual funds using a large sample of U.S. equity funds from 1994 to 2013. We consider diversity in terms of both final educational degree and field of educational specialisation. We find that, in general, both types of diversity have a positive impact on fund performance, and our results are robust over a wide range of performance metrics and changes in market conditions.     

Engineering the Financialization of Urban Entrpreneurialism: The JESSICA Urban Development Initiative in the European Union

Urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberal urban governance are assuming new forms under finance‐dominated accumulation. We examine and contribute to theorizing the mechanisms through which urban governance is financialized, taking as a case study JESSICA, one of the European Union's initiatives to implement an ‘urban sensitive’ policy for sustainable and integrated development. Like other initiatives promoting financialization, JESSICA deploys the logic of finance to select and fund urban social initiatives and development projects on the basis of their potential return on investment (ROI). Understanding this process requires placing questions of political economy—how urban governance is shaped by the broader political‐economic context—with questions of governmentality—how stakeholders are enrolled in and come to take for granted new governance initiatives. Following the multi‐scalar institutional infrastructure is crucial to understanding how this works. Taking a relational multi‐scalar approach, we trace how changes at the supranational scale filter down to shape urban policy selection and performance in Sofia, Bulgaria, where we document how ROI calculations conflict with social welfare priorities. Contrasts between the trajectory of financialization of urban governance in the European Union and the United States demonstrate how this is geographically variegated, shaped by the broader context/conjuncture within which such financialization is embedded.     

The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO₂ concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.     

An Examination of the Interaction Between Modelling and Its Relationship with Construction Kits: Lessons from the Past and for the Future

Construction kits have played a significant part in nurturing the growth and development of the minds and manipulation-based skills of children (and adults) in formal and non-formal education settings. These kits have origins rooted in the representation of the built world and now have a diversity of form and function, including technical versions with moving parts. This article examines some of the historically based ideas that lie behind the role that kits may have in terms of physical modelling. The article traces the transformation of kits from simple bricks and blocks into more complicated pieces for space-filling and achieving the transfer of forces and motion. This transformation occurred during the Victorian era when the influence of the ideas of educationalists and, perhaps rather strangely, exponents of early aviation, played major roles in determining the diversity of forms of construction kit and modelled possibilities that are now to be seen in classrooms and homes. The article ends with a review of some of the lessons from the past and present that will need to be considered in relation to concrete modelling in schools for the future. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Multinationals and Training: Some Evidence from Irish Manufacturing Industries

This paper sets out to analyse the effect of plant and sectoral level characteristics on the provision of training to employees using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. There is no clear evidence that foreign owned plants are more likely to provide training. By contrast, we find that they spend less than domestic plants on training, ceteris paribus. There is also no evidence that plants that receive training grants are more likely to provide training. This may be likely to reflect the targeting of training grants on plants that are otherwise unlikely to provide much training. We do, however, find that training activity in the sector, either by other foreign or domestic plants, has a positive effect on plant level training activity, at least for domestic owned plants.     

Trade, foreign firms and economic policy in Indonesian and Thai manufacturing

This paper first examines the rapid growth and changing composition of manufactured exports in Indonesia and Thailand, highlighting the rapid growth of office and computer machinery and electric machinery, somewhat slower growth of non-electric and transportation machinery, as well as the low growth of previously large exports of textiles apparel. Second, the important contributions of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) to export growth in the machinery industries, particularly in electric, office, and computing machinery, are documented. Third, the paper describes trade policies in all these industries in some detail, emphasizing how low protection was a key facilitator of rapid export growth in the MNEs that dominated the electric, office, and computing machinery industry, while high protection reduced incentives to export among MNEs in the transportation machinery industry.     

European Sugar Policy Reform and Agricultural Innovation

In July 2006, the European Union's (EU) Common Market Organization (CMO) for sugar underwent the first radical reform since its establishment in 1968. In this article, we study the incentives for adoption of new technologies before and after the policy reform. We build a stochastic partial equilibrium model and use it to analyze the effect of the policy reform on the adoption incentives of genetically modified herbicide tolerant sugar beet. Our findings show that the adoption incentives of high‐cost sugar beet farmers are significantly reduced under the new CMO. Medium‐cost producers, in contrast, have greater incentives to adopt new technologies, while low‐cost producers are largely left unaffected. The reduced adoption incentives of high‐cost farmers lead to lower flexibility and competitiveness of these farmers and therefore coincides with the goals of the reform to crowd out high‐cost producers and increase competitiveness of the European sugar market. En juillet 2006, l'Organisation commune du marché (OCM) du sucre a subi sa première réforme radicale depuis sa mise en place par l'UE en 1968. Dans la présente étude, nous avons examiné les incitatifs offerts pour l'adoption de nouvelles technologies, avant et après la réforme. Nous avons élaboré un modèle stochastique d'équilibre partiel et l'avons utilisé pour analyser les répercussions de la réforme sur les incitatifs offerts pour l'adoption de variétés de betteraves sucrières génétiquement modifiées résistantes aux herbicides. Selon nos résultats, les incitatifs offerts aux producteurs de betterave sucrière ayant des coûts marginaux élevés ont significativement diminué depuis la réforme de l'OCM du sucre. Par contre, les incitatifs offerts aux producteurs ayant des coûts marginaux moyens se sont accrus, tandis que ceux offerts aux producteurs ayant de faibles coûts marginaux n'ont pas changé. La diminution des incitatifs offerts aux producteurs ayant des coûts marginaux élevés entraîne une diminution de la souplesse et de la capacité concurrentielle de ces producteurs et, par conséquent, coïncide avec les objectifs de la réforme qui visent àévincer les producteurs ayant des coûts marginaux élevés et à accroître la capacité concurrentielle du marché européen du sucre.     

Comparing the impacts of Internet technology and national culture on online usage and purchase from a four-country perspective

The Internet has successfully generated an ever-expanding cohort of users for all its major concomitant activities, including information gathering, communications and transactions. So far no attempt has been made to validate whether such a success is so deep as to transcend national cultures. Nor any work has been conducted to compare the internationalisation¹ performances between online usage activities. The current study addresses these two research gaps from the perspective of four countries, i.e. Britain, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. Results show that although the technological forces have been quite successful in internationalising overall online usage activities, they succumb to the cultural forces as far as only the transactions activity, or more colloquially online purchase, is concerned. This indicates the relative difficulty in internationalising online purchase vis-à-vis other online usage activities. Further research on locating a series of step functions or kick-off time points regarding the development of online purchase is suggested.     

Membership has its privileges: the effect of social capital and neighbourhood characteristics on the earnings of microfinance borrowers

In this paper we examine the determinants of self-employment success for microcredit borrowers. Theories of social capital and neighbourhood effects are integrated in an attempt to account for earnings differentials among a unique sample of microfinance borrowers. We posit that social capital – social relations that facilitate individual action – is essential for microentrepreneurial success. Based on a survey and data collected by the authors, it is demonstrated that social capital is a positive determinant of self-employment earnings. The role that neighbourhoods play in fostering social capital and improving microentrepreneurial performance are also highlighted. JEL classification: J23, O17, Z13