Managerial failure in late Victorian Britain?: Land use and English agriculture

This article focuses upon the neglected role of agriculture in Britain's relative economic decline. Landlords and farmers stand accused of responding inadequately to the flood of American cereal imports. Land‐use changes are analysed by soil type and access to urban markets, revealing a range of opportunities and restraints, and an appropriate variety of responses. Other aspects of agriculturalists' responses to depression remain to be examined, but this exercise finds no evidence of significant managerial shortcomings. Rather, the interim verdict is similar to that on the performance of those British industrialists whose once‐savaged reputations have been partly redeemed by the researches of McCloskey, Sandberg, et al.     

Substitutes for legal protection: corporate governance and dividends in Victorian Britain1

Companies in Victorian Britain operated in a laissez‐faire legal environment from the perspective of outside investors, implying that such investors were not protected by the legal system. This article seeks to identify the alternative mechanisms that outside shareholders used to protect themselves by examining the dividend policy and governance of over 800 publicly traded companies at the beginning of the 1880s. We assess the importance of these mechanisms by estimating their impact on Tobin's Q. Our evidence suggests that dividends and well‐structured and incentivized boards of directors may have played a role in protecting the interests of outside investors.     

The death blow to unlimited liability in Victorian Britain: The City of Glasgow failure

In 1878, one of Britain’s largest banks, the City of Glasgow Bank, collapsed, leaving a huge deficit between its assets and liabilities. As this bank, similar to many other contemporary British banks, had unlimited liability, its failure was accompanied by the bankruptcy of the vast majority of its stockholders. It is generally believed that the collapse of this depository institution revealed the extent to which ownership in large joint-stock banks had been diffused to investors of very modest means. It is also believed that the failure resulted in bank shareholders dumping their shares unto the market. Our evidence, garnered from ownership records, trading data, and stock prices, offers no support for these widely held beliefs.     

运筹帷幄之底蕴--试论企业文化与企业战略

企业文化自20世纪80年代作为西方发达国家第四挖管理理论传入我国,由于社会文化背景不同,企业资产性质不同,企业业态不同,在理解与认识上存在各种各样的偏颇与差异。一个企业要在日益激烈的市场竞争中立于不败之地,实施有效的战略,没有成熟的企业文化不可能获得成功。可以这样说,企业文化是企业家精心打造的企业战略基础。     

新经济条件下的公司理财与企业理论

本文从新经济出发,研究公司理财理论面临的问题,分析了现有企业理论存在的缺陷,探讨了未来公司理财理论的基本框架。