Structuring information work: Ferranti and Martins Bank, 1952-1968

The adoption of large-scale computers by the British retail banks in the 1960s required a first-time dislocation of customer accounting from its confines in the branches, where it had been dealt with by paper-based and mechanized information systems, to a new collective space: the bank computer center. While historians have rightly stressed the continuities between centralized office work, punched-card tabulation and computerization, the shift from decentralized to centralized information work by means of a computer has received little attention. In this article, I examine the case of Ferranti and Martins Bank and employ elements of Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to highlight the difficulties of transposing old information practices directly onto new computerized information work

Too far ahead of its time: Barclays, Burroughs and real-time banking

The historiography of computing has until now considered real-time computing in banking as predicated on the possibilities of networked ATMs in the 1970s. This article reveals a different story. It exposes the failed bid by Barclays and Burroughs to make real time a reality for British banking in the 1960s

Asylum in Practice: Successes, Failures, and the Challenges Ahead

The Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America was organized to facilitate a transatlantic dialogue aimed at understanding just how well these asylum systems are balancing the dual goals. The Workshop was convened by the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) of Georgetown University and the Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies (CEPIC) of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was held on July 1-3, 1999, at Oxford University. The workshop examined key issues as to the workings of the U.S. and European asylum systems: decision making on claims, deterrence of abuse, independent review, return of rejected asylum seekers, scope of the refugee concept, social rights and employment, international cooperation, and data and evaluation. In this opening paper, we explain the significance of these issues and raise central questions about them

15 Years of New Growth Economics: What Have We Learnt?

Paul Romer’s paper Increasing Returns and Long Run Growth, now 15 years old, led to resurgence in the research on economic growth. Since then, growth literature has expanded dramatically and has shifted the research focus of many generations of macroeconomists. The new line of work has emphasized the role of human capital, social and political variables, as well as the importance of institutions as driving forces of long-run economic growth. This paper presents an insight into the theoretical and empirical literature of the past fifteen years, highlighting the most significant contributions for our understanding of economics.

15 years of new growth economics: What have we learnt?

This paper evaluates the empirical and theoretical contributions of the Economic Growth Literature since the publication of Paul Romer’s seminal paper in 1986.Economic gowth, technological progress, empirics of growth

I just ran four million regressions

In this paper I try to move away from the Extreme Bounds method of identifying ``robust'' empirical relations in the economic growth literature. Instead of analyzing the extreme bounds of the estimates of the coefficient of a particular variable, I analyze the entire distribution. My claim in this paper is that, if we do this, the picture emerging from the empirical growth literature is not the pessimistic ``Nothing is Robust'' that we get with the extreme bound analysis. Instead, we find that a substantial number of variables can be found to be strongly related to growth.Economic growth, growth regressions, empirical determinants of economic growth