Abundance and scarcity: classical theories of money, bank balance sheets and business models, and the British restriction of 1797‐1818.

The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms

Innovative research methods in health social sciences : an introduction

Innovative, or creative research, methods have become increasingly popular in the last few decades. In this chapter, I will include several salient issues on which chapters in the section on “Innovative Research Methods in Health Social Sciences” can be situated. First, I discuss some ideas about innovative and creative methods. This is followed with the notion of those who practice innovative methods: the innovative researcher. I will then bring readers through a number of innovative and creative methods that researchers have adopted in their research. These include the theoretical lens, arts-based and visual research methods, the body and embodiment research, digital methods, and textual (plus visual) methods of inquiry. As an innovative researcher, our choice of innovative methods primarily depends on the questions we pose; the people who are involved; our moral, ethical, and methodological competence as researchers; and the sociocultural environment of the research. As we are living in the world that continue to change, it is likely that health and social science researchers will continue to experiment with their creative methods in order to ensure the success of their research. I anticipate that in the future, we will see even more creative methods that researchers will bring forth