Mavericks and Mavens of Business History: Miriam Beard and Henrietta Larson

This is the story of two women with differing visions aboutbusiness who have largely been forgotten. Miriam Beard, themaverick daughter of Progressive reformers Charles and MaryBeard, wrote the first international cultural history of thebusinessman in 1938. Henrietta M. Larson was Harvard BusinessSchool's first lady, the first female faculty member and thefirst woman to be tenured there. The two women never met orinteracted. Yet their lives and histories were entangled whenone woman, Henrietta, wrote a critical review about the contributionsof the other. This article uses their untold story to tracethe contentious process of professionalization that sidelinedone maverick outsider and kept a maven insider on the marginsof a fledgling discipline she had helped to create. Its significanceis to make gender central to the reintegration of business andculture and of women's roles in the historiography of business.     

Imposing regularity conditions on a system of cost and factor share equations

Systems of equations comprising cost functions and first-order derivative equations are often used to estimate characteristics of production technologies. Unfortunately, many estimated systems violate the regularity conditions implied by economic theory. Sampling theory methods can be used to impose these conditions globally, but these methods destroy the flexibility properties of most functional forms. We demonstrate how Bayesian methods can be used to maintain flexibility by imposing regularity conditions locally. The Bayesian approach is used to estimate a system of cost and share equations for the merino wool-growing sector. The effect of local imposition of monotonicity and concavity on the signs and magnitudes of elasticities is examined.     

Manufacturing Industries in the UK: Was there Convergence during the 1968–1992 Period?

This paper uses detailed industry level time-series data for the UK regions which suggests that convergence (at least in terms of output-per-employee) was not occurring during the period 1968–92. Based on testing for unit roots, it is found that in a majority of industries and regions growth was divergent, and consequently there is little empirical support for the neoclassical 'long‐run catch up' model.