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.     

Interorganisational project dynamics: A longitudinal study of perceptual distance and client-contractor collaborative relationships

Despite the importance of good collaborative relationships in interorganisational projects, clients and contractors often develop adversarial relationships due to perceptual distance about key project issues. In this case study research, we investigated how perceptual distance emerges and changes over time, and how the collaborative relationship between client and contractor develops alongside these dynamics. In this exploration, we built upon agency theory and stewardship theory as complementary perspectives for understanding client-contractor collaborative relationships. We gathered quantitative and qualitative data in two projects, conducting three assessments in about one year. We found that perceptual distance increased and decreased over time, and that a reduction was typically associated with the collaborative relationship being characterized by stewardship rather than agency. These findings suggest that a regular assessment and evaluation of partners’ perceptions of critical project issues is warranted to timely detect and counteract perceptual distance. Moreover, partners would best adopt a stewardship orientation to reduce perceptual distance, although this may take considerable effort given the distributive nature of many pre-project negotiations.     

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.     

Larger,counter-intuitive and lasting – The PSM role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic,exploring opportunities for theoretical and actionable advances

PSM has played an important role in the initial mitigation of risks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the nature and scope of this role and develop a roadmap for PSM contributions towards greater supply chain resilience. We find that the role of PSM is (1) multidimensional; responding to supply risks but also to demand and logistics risks, (2) counter to game theory; collaboration increased instead of decrease, (3) multi-stage; beyond the initial response the hardest change efforts are still ahead. The pandemic is accelerating the journey towards future-proof PSM but not necessarily revolutionizing the future of PSM.     

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.     

Het consulaatwezen

Rapport de la Commission chargée d'étudier l'organisation du corps consulaire français. (Mémorial diplomatique van 24 en 31Januari, 7 en 14Februari 1885).