Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

Lowell J. Satre. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xi + 308 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1625-1, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8214-1626-X, $24.95 (paper).

Solid scholarly historical studies of overseas businesses inAfrica are rare. Rarer still are studies of this area that dealwith ethics and corporate responsibility without cant or overheatedrhetoric. Lowell J. Satre’s Chocolate on Trial standsout as a nuanced history of the dilemmas of doing business responsiblyin a colonial setting. The paradoxes it describes are similarto what many corporations face today. The book demonstratesthat the     

Guus Veenendaal. Spoorwegen in Nederland. Van 1834 tot nu. Amsterdam: Boom, 2004. 604 pp. ISBN 90-5352-980-2, {euro}49.50.

This book is a commissioned history for Nederlandse Spoorwegen(Dutch Railways, or NS), but in his foreword the author claimsthat the commission had no influence on the contents. Afterreading the book, I believe in the sincerity of this claim.NS is only visible commercially in a very subtle manner, thatis, in the choice of the company colors (yellow and blue) forthe book dust jacket. While NS formally was founded only in 1917—as a communityof interests of the     

Bank Performance and Credit Availability in the Bulgarian Banking Sector, 1997-2001

Abstract

The 1997 financial crisis wiped out 30% of the Bulgarian banking sector and created severe strains on corporations. With the establishment of the currency board in 1997 and the new Banking Law, which set the legal framework for proper bank supervision, major Bulgarian banks were rapidly privatized through sales to foreigners, now controlling around 80% of bank assets. Since 1997, the Bulgarian banking sector has recovered from the crisis by improving its profitability and efficiency and adopted a legal framework compatible with the European Union standards. Based on a regression analysis of bank balance sheets and income statements, this paper shows that low level of credit volume during 1997-1999 derived from banks' cautious stance towards credit making reflecting both the ongoing risks in the real sector, and the stringent new banking regulations. Large banks, however, benefited from scale economies in improving profitability in the same period.     

Frank P. Jozsa, Jr. Sports Capitalism: The Foreign Business of American Professional Leagues. Aldershot, Hants, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004. xiv + 316 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4185-6, $99.95 (cloth).

Students of international business will find this a useful andfrustrating book. It is encyclopedic in its coverage and exhaustivelyresearched. Approximately 20 percent of the book’s 316pages consists of notes, while another 10 percent is bibliography.The book is intended for nonspecialists; a glossary includesterms as diverse as economic profit, Hall of Fame, Super Bowl,and work ethic. Of these, only ‘Super Bowl’ appearsin the extremely short, five-and-a-half page index. Jozsa’srole has been to organize this material and bring     

Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

Anne G. Hanley. Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1920. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. xviii + 286 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5072-6, $55.00 (paper).

Anne Hanley presents a lucid and impressive narrative of theevolution of financial markets in São Paulo, Brazil.She traces the evolution of the banking sector and SãoPaulo stock exchange from the end of the Empire (Brazil wasan empire with a constitutional monarchy between 1822 and 1889)through the first three decades of the Republic (1889–1920)and the contemporaneous evolution of capital markets from theirearly "personalistic" stage to "maturity" in the early twentieth     

Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the     

Richard Coopey, Sean O'Connell, and Dilwyn Porter. Mail Order Retailing in Britain: A Business and Social History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. viii + 248 pp. ISBN 0-19-829650-9, $95.00 (cloth).

There is little doubt that there is a great need for more booksof this type. This book is a welcome addition to books in theOxford University Press collection that address issues in businesshistory. Therefore, as an addition to a collection that includesGeoffrey Jones’s British Trading Companies in the Nineteenthand Twentieth Centuries, this book provides access to a fascinatingaspect of British commercial     

Thomas C. Owen. Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv + 275 pp. ISBN 0-674-01549-5, $49.95.

Fedor Chizhov (1811–1877) has long been undervalued inthe history of Imperial Russia, despite his manifest importancein journalism, Slavophile ideology, the development of industry,railroads, banking, and economic thought. The reasons for thisneglect are twofold. From a practical point of view, the sourcethat most illuminates Chizhov and his context—the candidand detailed diary he kept from the age of fourteen—hasnot been available to western researchers until recently, andSoviet (and later Russian) researchers made little use of it.The reason     

Jack Goody. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 0-7456-3190-8, $56.95 (cloth); 0-7456-3191-6, $21.95 (paper).

When and why did the West gain its current economic advantageover the rest of the world? This topic is the source of an animateddebate within the academy today. Jack Goody, a noted socialanthropologist, analyzes these questions and offers his ownviews in his new book, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. The participants in this debate often have been divided intotwo broad camps. On the one side, which I will call here theEuropeanists, are those who     

Lending Relationships,Bank Default and Economic Activity

The paper reviews contributions in the literature, which lend theoretical and empirical credibility to the idea that the banking relationship is valuable and important for the firm. Banks offer a lending relationship as the solution to the firm's ongoing credit needs. Bank default disrupts this relationship. Hence risk in the banking sector influences the value of the relationship, the cost of corporate finance, and the level and growth of real activity. As bank default is often the result of fraud and internal irregularities, it is hard to predict. Bank default affects the economy through a number of different channels. The loss of the relationship, benefit for the firm is an important route through which the health of the banking sector influences real activity.     

AnnaLee Saxenian. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 424 pp. ISBN 0-674-02201-7, $27.95 (paper).

This book considers a fascinating aspect of new technology businessesand the network economies that support their development. Essentially,it is about the movement of technically skilled professionalswho have been drawn into the commercial environment of SiliconValley and their subsequent technology transfer relationshipwith the part of the world from which they were originally drawn.To use the phraseology of the book, this is about "brain circulation"as opposed to     

Ernesto R. Gantman. Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. viii + 185 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4186-4, $99.95.

Is management a science or an ideology? Do management theoriesexplore the best way to maximize society’s welfare byefficiently coordinating inputs to produce the most output?Or are they window dressing concealing the exploitation of labor? An Argentinean professor, Ernesto Gantman surveys two centuriesof American management theory to argue that ideology trumpsscience. (Though the book purports to be a study of managementideology generally, it is almost exclusively about the UnitedStates.) Gantman quickly     

Economic policy uncertainty,non-financial enterprises' shadow banking activities and stock price crash risk

At present, the structural contradiction between Economic Financialization and the real economy's long-term weakness has become increasingly prominent. As China enters a “new normal” stage of economic growth, the real investment rate drops, non-financial enterprises continuously allocate resources to the shadow banking system. The financial economy becomes increasingly divorced from reality. This leads us to the questions: will the shadow banking behavior of non-financial companies exacerbate the risk of stock price crash risk? How does the increase in economic policy uncertainty affect the relationship between non-financial companies' shadow banking activities and stock price crash risk?This article uses non-financial listed companies' data from 2007 to 2017 and conducts empirical analysis to answer this question. The study finds that companies engaged in high-leverage, high-risk shadow banking business exacerbate stock crash risk. This effect is only pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and low social trust regions. The increase in the degree of economic policy uncertainty positively impacts the relationship between non-financial companies' shadow banking business and stock price crash risk. The theoretical mechanism is as follows: the rise in economic policy uncertainty amplifies the positive relationship between shadow banking activities of non-financial companies and stock price crashes by increasing bank loans, investors' sensitivity to external information, risk cross-contagion, and inefficient investment mechanisms. Various robustness tests do not change the research conclusion. This paper has important theoretical and policy guidance significance for reviewing the existing diversified shadow banking system and preventing systemic risks.     

Julie Hessler. A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 366 pp. ISBN 0-691-11492-7, $39.50.

Julie Hessler’s work is the first comprehensive historyof the first thirty-five years of Soviet trade written afterthe opening of the Soviet Union’s archives following thatnation’s collapse. It will, without doubt, become a standardwork of reference. Hessler gives due credit to the Soviet historianG. A. Dikhtiar’s three-volume work on Russian and Soviettrade published in the 1960s (in Russian). Despite the book’sobvious ideological overtones, it deserves to be read alongsideHessler’s work. Hessler’s     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

Clement M. Henry and Rodney Wilson, eds. The Politics of Islamic Finance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. vi + 307 pp. ISBN 0-7486-1837-6, $30.00 (paper).

Clement Henry and Rodney Wilson have assembled twelve essaysabout Islamic finance—six about thematic issues and sixabout case studies of Sudan, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia,and Egypt—plus an introduction and conclusion. Henry and Wilson’s introductory chapter is an excellentsummary of the phenomenon of Islamic banks, including theirorigins, size, and banking practices. The banks largely datefrom the mid-1970s. Purist Islamic economists thought Islamicbanking should be based on profit sharing, in which the depositor’sfunds are     

Om Prakash. Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade, 1500-1800. New Delhi, India: Manohar Publishers, 2004. 426 pp. ISBN 81-7304-538-0, $48.95 (paper).

In this significant book, edited by a well-known scholar ofIndian economic history, Om Prakash attempts to provide thoroughanalysis of the interaction between the European and Indianmerchants, two important groups that participated in the tradingactivities in the region during the period 1500–1800.This was an important period in the premodern Indian historybecause of the phenomenal expansion of global contact and exchangethat led to     

James Aho. Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral and Rhetorical Roots of Accounting. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. xx + 131 pp. ISBN 0-7914-6545-4, $40.00.

Confession and bookkeeping, at first sight, have an unlikelybut important link with the origins and development of capitalism,as a set of business practices and as the conceptualizationof such practices. Werner Sombart originally contended thatcapitalism and double entry bookkeeping (DEB) were inextricablylinked as form and content, a theme also developed by Max Weberas part of his analysis of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. James Aho’s book addresses this important theme and makesa