Evolution or revolution? a study of price and wage volatility in England, 1200-1900

Using annual data 1209-1914, this paper examines whether there are structural breaks in the movements of prices and wages that correspond to the major ‘revolutions’ identified in historical narratives. Econometric modelling of trend and volatility in prices and wages confirms the importance of the Commercial Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, but suggests that the Industrial Revolution may be better described in evolutionary terms. The evidence also points to a late medieval revolution at the time of the Good Parliament, shortly after the Black Death and just before the Peasant’s Revolt. This supports Britnell and Campbell’s commercialisation hypothesis - that the institutional pre-conditions for the Industrial Revolution began to develop at a very early date.Economic evolution; Economic revolution; Historical economics;

Modelling the medieval economy: money, prices and income in England, 1263-1520

This chapter presents a simple econometric model of the medieval English economy, focusing on the relationship between money, prices and incomes. The model is estimated using annual data for the period 1263-1520 obtained from various sources. The start date is determined by the availability of continuous runs of annual data, while the finishing date immediately precedes the take-off of Tudor price inflation. Accounts from the ecclesiastical and monastic estates have survived in great numbers for this period, thereby ensuring that crop yields can be estimated from a regionally representative set of estates

Entrepreneurial failure and economic crisis: an historical perspective

This chapter analyses the major UK economic crises that have occurred since the speculative bubbles of the seventeenth century. It integrates insights from economic history and business history to analyse both the general economic conditions and the specific business and financial practices that led to these crises. The analysis suggests a significant reinterpretation of the evidence – one that questions economists’ conventional views

The impossibility of international business

The optimal location of plants by a global firm is analysed for the first time using measures of distance along the spherical surface of Planet Earth. With a uniform distribution of customers an optimal location strategy will normally seek a space-filling configuration of identical areas that are as near circular as possible. The hexagonal space-filling solution for location on an infinite plane cannot be generalised to the surface of a sphere. Different spatial patterns are required for different numbers of plants; these may be based on triangles, squares or pentagons. The chapter reviews the current state of knowledge on the topic, drawing on theories of spherical geometry and regular convex polyhedra, and on applications in physics, chemistry and medicine. Overall, there appears to be no general solution to the problem; only a set of quite different solutions for various special cases. The lack of any general solution to this central problem in international business illustrates the ‘impossibility’ referred to in the title of this chapter

The Costly Business of Trust

The paper provides a framework to analyses trust-based projects which can be used as a diagnostic tool to design more effective policy intervention, particularly addressing the problem of meeting users needs for which many microfinance scheme have come under criticism. the theory is developed on the basis of both secondary literature and direct empirical evidence from two micro-finance projects in Mexico. we illustrate how a system of trust is built, and derive general propositions regarding the specificity of trust, the role of trust brokers, and the policy of subsidising trust-building projects, that can be applied both to microfinance and other trust-based development projects. we aim, to provide a tool capable of identifying crucial actors in trust systems and the nature of the linkages between them, so that trust can be effectively operationalised and incorporated into policy design in order to improve projects' effectiveness and suitability to local conditions.

Entrepreneurship studies: the case for radical change

Entrepreneurship studies needs to re-engage with classic disciplines such as economics, history, statistics, geography and sociology. Fifty years ago there was a widely agreed methodology for social science research based on techniques developed by these disciplines. They analysed the evolution of complex social and economic systems in terms of rationality, efficiency, competition, co-operation, equilibrium and stability. Today their insights are misunderstood and increasingly ignored. Entrepreneurship studies needs to go back in order to go forward: it must re-engage with traditional techniques in order for research to progress in future

Compassionate capitalism: Lessons from medieval Cambridge

Idea of pursuing competitiveness while promoting the common good began as early as the medieval period, write Catherine Casson, Mark Casson, John Lee, and Katie Phillip

The economic theory of international supply chains: a systems view

This paper offers an integrated analysis of out-sourcing, off-shoring and foreign direct investment within a systems view of international business. This view takes the supply chain rather than the firm as the basic unit of analysis. It argues that competition in the global economy selects supply chains that maximise the joint profit of all the firms in the chain. The systems view is compared with the firm-centred view commonly used in strategy literature. The paper shows that a firm’s strategy must be embedded within an efficient supply chain strategy, and that this strategy must be negotiated with, rather than imposed upon, other firms. The paper analyses the conditions under which various supply chain strategies - and by implication various firm-level strategies - are efficient. Only by adopting a systems view of supply chains is it possible to determine which firm-level strategies will succeed in a volatile global economy

A second order algebraic knot concordance group

We define an algebraic group comprising symmetric chain complexes which captures the first two stages of the Cochran-Orr-Teichner solvable filtration of the knot concordance group in a single invariant. To achieve this we impose additional structure on each chain complex which puts extra control on the fundamental groups, and in particular on the way in which they can change in a concordance.Comment: 51 pages, 2 figures. This a considerably shortened version of arXiv:1109.0761, to appear in Algebraic and Geometric Topolog