Evading the ‘Taint of Usury’: The usury prohibition as a barrier to entry

The development of capital markets in medieval Europe was shaped for centuries by the religious ban on lending money at interest. This paper examines how this prohibition developed as the outcome of strategic behavior by religious, commercial and political elites. A model is developed to analyze this hypothesis and to examine how the usury prohibition developed over time. It suggests that an important reason for the persistence of the ban was that it created a barrier to entry that enabled secular rulers, the Church, and a small number of merchant-bankers to earn monopoly rents.     

NATURE, MARKETS AND STATE RESPONSE: THE DROUGHT OF 1939 IN JAPAN AND KOREA

Large areas of Northeast Asia experienced drought in 1939. Agricultural production in Korea decreased significantly, but the drought did not cause famine in Japan despite its dependence on rice imports from Korea. The paper analyses the impact of the 1939 drought on the markets for rice and electricity in Japan. The authorities were ill-prepared for such a disaster but willing to use it for the purpose of covering for other problems. The drought thus accelerated the move of Japan's economic system towards a managed economy. A lower total rainfall in Japan in 1940 did not generate similar problems, suggesting that the broader political, economic, and social context is crucial to the identification of short-term climatic fluctuations as crises.     

USING AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN BUSINESS HISTORY: A NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF JULES JOUBERT'S SHAVINGS AND SCRAPES

Entrepreneur autobiographies provide business historians with the opportunity to connect storytelling and identity, topics that are now prominent in economic debate. Yet lingering concern about the subjectivity of life writing prevents wider use of autobiographies within business history. This article seeks to allay such concern by applying the narratological method to the colonial entrepreneur Jules Joubert's autobiography, Shavings and Scrapes. Joubert's narrative identity is as an ‘adventurer’. This identity shored up his self‐image and was used by him to enhance his reputation. Narratology shows that an autobiography can stabilise and publicise the colonial entrepreneur's narrative identity, thereby benefiting their business career.     

Trends and Cycles in Sydney and Melbourne House Prices from 1880 to 2011

This article provides a series of indicative house and land prices for Sydney and Melbourne for 1880–1970, which, spliced to modern data, gives price series spanning 1880–2011. The broad trends highlight no significant movement in real prices to the 1950s followed by a persistent and significant trend rise in prices in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first century. Over this long period, there have been several cycles in house prices, the two most significant in the 1880s and an unfinished cycle in the 2000s.     

INTERNAL LABOUR MARKETS: EVIDENCE FROM TWO LARGE AUSTRALIAN EMPLOYERS

This paper examines internal labour markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century using personnel records from the Union Bank of Australia and the Victorian Railways. Both employers hired young workers and offered them the possibility of very-long-term employment. Salaries were determined by impersonal rules, such as being attached to tenure and to position. Workers rarely received nominal pay cuts. This approach to human resources was designed to retain and motivate workers. We show that all of the classic features of internal labour markets used to describe American firms in the 1970s were present dating back to the Victorian period.     

COLONIALISM AND INDUSTRIALISATION: FACTORY LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY OF COLONIAL KOREA, 1913–37

Unlike other colonial economies, Korea industrialised rapidly during its colonial period, which past scholars attributed to the industrialisation policy directed by the Japanese colonial government between 1930 and 1945. Our analysis of factory labour productivity from 1913 to 1937 suggests significant revisions to this claim. Factory labour productivity as well as total production grew rapidly before the active intervention of the colonial government. In addition, Korean entrepreneurs invested heavily in their firms and successfully competed with Japanese entrepreneurs. We conjecture that the pre-war experience of Korean entrepreneurs provided a critical foundation for the post-colonial economic growth.     

Estimating high-dimensional demand systems in the presence of many binding non-negativity constraints

Two econometric issues arise in the structural estimation of consumer or producer demand systems in the presence of many binding non-negativity constraints. Firstly, most existing methods entail the evaluation of multivariate probability integrals. Secondly, the issue of statistical coherency must be addressed. We circumvent both of these issues using Gibbs’ Sampling, along with data augmentation and rejection sampling. We illustrate our method using several simulated data sets.     

Mo对Ti（C，N）基金属陶瓷组织性能的影响

研究了Mo含量对Ti（C,N）基金属陶瓷组织性能的影响。试样用常规粉末冶金方法制备,在材料中加入4～12wt％的Mo,分别于1430℃、1440℃、1450℃及1460℃真空烧结。测试了试样的抗弯强度及硬度,用扫描电镜观察其显微组织并做能谱分析,确定元素的相对含量。结果显示,当Mo含量为8wt％、烧结温度为1450℃时材料的综合性能最好。     

Foreign currency debt,financial crises and economic growth: A long-run view

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect effects on short-term growth and long-run output effects in both 1880–1913 and 1973–2003 for 45 countries. Greater ratios of foreign currency debt to total debt are associated with increased risks of currency and debt crises, although the strength of the association depends crucially on the size of a country's reserve base and its policy credibility. We found that financial crises, driven by exposure to foreign currency, resulted in significant permanent output losses. We estimate some implications of our findings for the risks posed by currently high levels of foreign currency liabilities in eastern Europe.     

R&D Patterns in the Video Display Terminal Industry

A long-standing question asks whether small firms or large firms are more successful in product innovation, and the answer seems to be coming up, "It depends." Professors Link and Zmud reveal some of the things it depends on when they describe the results of their research on the VDT industry. They see the VDT industry as a possible prototype of the several technologically progressive industries now growing toward the early stages of maturity. What we see here today may be a forerunner of what we'll see elsewhere in the near future.