The Business History Conference's blog The Exchange has a list of new and forthcoming books in economic and business history. There are several that I am looking forward to reading
Anne Fleming, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, December 2017)
Douglas A. Irwin, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, November 2017)
Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, eds., Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development(University of Chicago Press, December 2017)
Qian Lu, From Partisan Banking to Open Access: The Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Palgrave, October 2017)
Laura Philips Sawyer, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940(Cambridge University Press, December 2017)
This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Business History's Introspective Mood
Business history appears to be in an introspective mood.
Business
History Review has a special issue on debating methodology in business
history.
The latest issue of Business History
examines the role of narrative in business history.
In First View at Enterprise
and Society you can find Water Friedman’s talk “Recent Trends in Business History:
Capitalism, Democracy, and Innovation” from the meeting of the Business
History Conference.
In general, business history seems to be an unusually
introspective field.
The introduction to the special issue of Business History Review,
for instance, provides this list of recent work on methodology in business
history:
“Recent examples
include Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business
Leadership and Decision Making under Uncertainty,” Enterprise & Society 2,
no. 4 (2001): 632–59; Mary O’Sullivan and Margaret B. W. Graham, “Moving
Forward by Looking Backward: Business History and Management Studies,” Journal
of Management Studies 47, no. 5 (2010): 775–90; Geoffrey Jones and Walter A.
Friedman, “Business History: Time for Debate,” Business History Review 85, no. 1
(2011): 1–8; Daniel M. G. Raff, “How to Do Things with Time,” Enterprise &
Society 14, no. 3 (2013): 435–66; Matthias Kipping and Behlül Üsdiken, “History
and Organization Studies: A Long-Term View,” in Organizations in Time: History,
Theory, Methods, ed. Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani (New York, 2014),
33–55; Abe de Jong, David Michael Higgins, and Hugo van Driel, “Towards a New
Business History?” Business History 57, no. 1 (2015): 5–29; Stephanie Decker,
Matthias Kipping, and Daniel Wadhwani, “New Business Histories! Plurality in
Business History Research Methods,” Business History 57, no. 1 (2015): 30–40;
and Christina Lubinski and Daniel Wadhwani, “Reinventing Entrepreneurial
History,” Business History Review (forthcoming).”
Monday, September 25, 2017
New History of Capitalism meets the History of Economic Thought
Jonathan Levy has a paper forthcoming in Business History Review, “Capital
as Process and the History of Capitalism.” If you have access to the
journal it is available on First View. He attempts to develop a definition of
capital that is useful for the study of capitalism. I should be grading papers
right now so I will make this quick.
Unfortunately, it bears many of the hallmarks of some of
the most celebrated work in the new history of capitalism.
1. Misunderstanding basic economics: Here for, for instance, is
his description of the problems associated with thinking of capital as a
produced means of production
And yet, because it
equates capital with a produced physical factor of production, the materialist
conception is a highly restrictive definition of capital. For the writing of
history, there are chiefly three almost natural consequences of the materialist
restriction. First, because of its emphasis on a produced factor of physical
production, capital becomes almost synonymous with industrial machinery and
equipment. Second, likewise the materialist capital concept abstracts from
money—treating monetary and financial dynamics as extrinsic to both capital and
the “real economy” in general. Third, for reasons to be explained later, the materialist
capital concept is a temporally static concept. Thus, in addition to money it
also abstracts from historical time—or at least, in pursuit of analytical
clarity, it abstracts from the many eventful historical processes that are
extrinsic from the point of view of the physical characteristics of the masses
of objects that materialists define as capital.
Reference to a principles of economics textbook would have
made clear that capital is not synonymous with industrial machinery and
equipment.
2. Use of sources that can at best be described as sloppy. I
have been interested in Veblen since I was an undergraduate. Levy seems
interested in Veblen as well. When I checked the places where
Levy specifically quotes Veblen this is what I found. Levy is in bold
“At the most abstract
level, capital, in this line of thought, is what Thorstein Veblen once called a
“pecuniary magnet.”11 (Levy page 5)
“11
Thorstein B. Veblen, “On the Nature of Capital II: Investment, Intangible
Assets, and the
Pecuniary Magnate,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 23, no. 1
(1908): 104–36.”
One might think that Veblen used the phrase “pecuniary
magnet” in this paper. He did not. He did use the phrase “pecuniary magnate.”
But a magnate is not a magnet. Veblen is referring to people, “captains of
industry,” not capital. If Veblen ever referred to capital as a pecuniary
magnet it was not in the cited paper.
Oddly enough, Berch Berberoglu made this same mistake earlier this year. Since neither references the other one has to conclude that they made the mistake independently.
“By becoming the
exclusive legal owners of capitalized goods, capitalists over time had
politically and legally “cornered” the market in immaterial “technological
expedients.”42” (Levy page 14)
“42 Thorstein B. Veblen, “Fisher’s Capital and Income,” Political
Science Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1908): 117.”
Again, one might think that the quoted phrases appear on page 117; they do not. Like “pecuniary magnet” they do not appear anywhere in the
paper.
“Addressing culture, Veblen argued that
capital was merely one economic “method of
doing things” in the
world among others.44” (Levy page 14)
“44 Thorstein
B. Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, no. 4 (1898): 389.”
Levy is at least in the ballpark this time. Veblen uses the
phrase “methods of doing things.” He does not, however, use it on page 389.
Page 389 is devoted to his critique of the hedonistic conception of man, not an
argument that capital was merely one economic method of doing things.
“If capital has no fixed,
authentic value, the question becomes, as Veblen put it, “Whose imputation of
value is to be accepted?”71 (Levy page 20)
“71 Veblen,
“Fisher’s Capital and Income,” 120.”
This time Levy almost nailed it. The quote is in the paper,
and he only missed the citation by 5 pages; its on page 125.
At what point does putting quotation marks around things
that were not a actually said by the person they are attributed to become a
problem in historical scholarship.
Sunday, September 3, 2017
I Blame Foner
The author in New York Times
By
the Book today was Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage
the Bones
These are her answers to two of the questions:
What’s the last great book you read?
“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of
America Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist. It taught me so much about slavery
and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house
after reading it, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery
underpinning it all.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book
recently?
From “The Half Has Never Been Told”: “All told, more than
$600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in
1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd
slaves — 6 percent of the total U.S. population — who in that year toiled in
labor camps on slavery’s frontier.”
In other words, the most interesting thing she has learned
from a book recently is an inaccurate assessment of the role of slavery in the American
economy that was
concocted in Ed Baptist’s imagination and presented in one of the worst
books by an academic historian that I have ever read.
I blame Eric Foner. Foner is not the only one to blame, but
he certainly deserves a large share of the blame.
Foner praised the book in The New York Times and did not point out that Baptist
was simply making things up. Foner is a famous historian with a long record of
impressive scholarship. It is not unreasonable for non-historians to place
their faith in his assessments of work in American history. We all count on
recognized experts to give us some guidance in areas that are beyond our
personal expertise. Foner, however, failed them. He took a shot at economists,
repeated Baptist’s misleading historiography, and failed to note the
fundamental flaws in the book.
The flaws truly are fundamental. The claim that slavery was
the driving force behind American economic development was central to Baptist’s
book. I have seen the book cited on this point by numerous people. Yet Baptist
did not actually estimate the importance of slavery; he did not even try. He
made a up some numbers, added them up and compared them to an actual estimate of GDP.
The way he added up the numbers did not make sense. He is clearly unfamiliar with
the problem of double counting or the difference between the sales of newly
produced goods and the sales of assets. Even if he had looked in a principles of
economics textbook to learn the basics of national income accounting, however, it would not have solved the fundamental problem: he was just making up the numbers. Non-historians
are likely say to themselves, “These numbers must be okay; it was reviewed by famous
historians, like Eric Foner, and they did not say anything.” Eric Foner, however, does not have that
excuse. Nor do other historians who refused to call bullshit on Baptist. Foner
owed the readers of the New York Times
a critical reading of the book, and he let them down. Personally, I think this
unwillingness to call bullshit on other historians, just because you like their
conclusions, is a serious threat to the integrity of history.
As for me, as long as people keep citing his book, I will
keep pointing out that Baptist is a charlatan.
Friday, September 1, 2017
Economic History to Read, Listen and Watch
Read:
Victoria Bateman on Why
bigger states are more progressive
Listen:
Gregory Clark on Rationally
Speaking on What
Caused the Industrial Revolution? (and the why it is so difficult to answer
that question)
Noel Johnson at the Economics
Detective on The
French Revolution, Property Rights and the Coase Theorem
Watch:
Alan Taylor on credit
booms and crises in economic history
Deirdre McCloskey on How we got rich
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Business History and the Great Divergence
Luca Zan and Kent Deng “Micro Foundations in the
Great Divergence Debate: Opening Up a New Perspective” LSE Department of
Economic History Working Paper No. 256 Jan. 2017
Abstract
Prevailing approaches in historical studies adopt a macro
view and place an overwhelming emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as a major
discontinuity in Western development. On the contrary, recent research in
accounting, management and business history has suggested a different
direction. When opting for a micro-level focus, crucial discontinuities in
management and accounting in the West can be traced back to the Renaissance
Period. The paper thus searches for ‘micro foundations’ in managing and
accounting practices to address the on-going debate on the East-West
divergence. Despite the obvious problems with source availability, we outline a
new research agenda for the debate.
Geoffrey Jones Business
History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence Harvard Business
School Working Paper 18-004
Abstract
This working paper provides a business history perspective
on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the
West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a
narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and causes of the Great
Divergence has focused on macro analysis. This working paper identifies the
potential for more engagement at the micro level of business enterprises. While
recognizing that the context of institutions, education, and culture plays a
role in explanations of wealth and poverty, the paper calls for a closer
engagement with the processes of how these factors translated into generating
productive firms and entrepreneurs. The challenges of catching up were
sufficiently great in the Rest that initially ethnic and religious minorities
held significant advantages in raising capital and trust levels, which enabled
them to flourish as entrepreneurs. Yet by the interwar years, there is evidence
of a more general emergence of modern business enterprise in Asia, Latin
America, and Africa. Many governmental policies after 1945 designed to
facilitate catch-up ended up crippling such emergent business enterprises
without putting effective alternatives in place. The second wave of
globalization from the 1980s provided more opportunities for catch-up from the
Rest. Firms from emerging markets had the opportunity to access the global
networks that replaced large integrated firms. There were also new ways to
access knowledge and capital, including through management consultancies and
hiring graduates from business schools. The upshot was the rise to global
prominence of firms based in the Rest, including Foxcomm, Huawei, HNA, Cemex,
and TCS.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Steinbaum on Public Choice
Marshall Steinbaum has published a
sort of review of NancyMacLean's Democracy in Chains in
which describes “the racist origins of Public Choice theory” and suggests
that everyone should read Democracy in Chains “despite its rhetorical
shortcomings.”
Steinbaum seems to unquestioningly accept MacLean’s claim that
Buchanan’s “study of how government officials make decisions became “public
choice economics.”” (MacLean xxiii) In making public choice theory and
Buchanan's though synonymous, Steinbaum and MacLean strip public choice of all
context other than that related to Buchanan. Buchanan, however, was only one of
a number of people attempting to apply economic methods (rational choice and
models) to the analysis of both politics and political philosophy. Duncan
Black’s work was published before Buchanan, and Ken Arrow, William Riker,
Vincent Ostrom, Amartya Sen and others were working on this approach in the 1950s and 1960s at the
same time as Buchanan. To the best of my knowledge, none of them appear
in Democracy in Chains. They are not listed in the index. The point is that there were a lot of people interested in applying
the economic approach to politics. Many of them did not have the same normative
preferences as Buchanan. It is this broader approach to public choice that
you will find in Mueller’s
text on the subject. It is even what you will find here at the Library
of Economics and Liberty. Public choice is more than James Buchanan.
By the way, this is more of a defense of public choice
theory than it is of Buchanan,Virginia, or UVA. The University of Virginia was
an avowedly racist and sexist place in the '50s and '60s? UVA was both all
white and all male (until the 1970s). To the best of my knowledge neither
Buchanan or anyone of his colleagues at the time made any effort to change
that. Of course that could be said of most of the men at UVA and a lot of other
universities at the time. The liberty they were most concerned with seemed to
be the liberty of men like themselves.
I'll also say that I have no intention of reading the whole
book. If you want to say I have no right to criticize it until I have read the
whole thing, go ahead. I don’t care. I don’t have enough time to waste on
historians that I do not trust. This is particularly true for a subject that I
do not regard as my area of expertise. If it is nineteenth or early twentieth
century American economic history I can quickly identify inconsistencies and
errors, but for other topics I need to have some faith in the historian. For me
the bottom line on MacLean’s book is still that there are numerous instances
where she did not honestly represent her sources. Misrepresenting your sources
is more than a rhetorical shortcoming.
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Trust Company Failures and Institutional Change in New York, 1875-1925
My paper "Trust Company Failures and Institutional Change in New York, 1875-1925" is now available under First View at Enterprise and Society.
Here are the first two paragraphs
Here are the first two paragraphs
The State of New York created the
first trust company in 1822, when
it granted a corporate charter to
the Farmers’ Fire Insurance and
Loan Company, later renamed
Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company,
and authorized it to act as a
trustee. As the name suggests, Farmers
and other early trust companies,
like the New York Life Insurance
and Trust Company and the
Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance
Company, also sold insurance, and
they provided trusts as an alternative
to insurance. Trust companies
later used their trust powers
to facilitate the development of
corporate finance by serving as registrars
and transfer agents for corporate
securities and as trustees for
corporate mortgages. Trust
companies also accepted deposits; by the
middle of the nineteenth century,
some of these deposits could be withdrawn
on demand including by check.
Thus, by the late nineteenth
century, trust companies in New
York occupied a unique position in
the financial system by combining
functions associated with banks
with functions associated with
trustees.
Between 1875 and 1925, the number
of trust companies in New York
State increased from ten to 110,
and the total resources of trust companies
increased more rapidly than those
of state banks or savings
banks. Trust companies have been
characterized as early examples
of “shadow banks,” operating
outside the laws and regulations that
applied to commercial banks. However,
as with other financial institutions,
New York State trust companies
rarely failed. Between 1875
and 1925, the superintendent of
banks only intervened eleven times
to deal with troubled trust
companies, and in several of these cases
the trust company reopened.
Despite this rarity, these failures provide
a path to understanding the
overall success of trust companies.
The path leads through
institutions: failures played a leading role in
shaping the institutions that
governed trust companies. Consequently,
failures shaped the expectations
and actions of everyone involved
with trust companies: depositors,
shareholders, and executives.
Friday, July 28, 2017
Some recent history and economic history
The latest issue of History Now from the Gilder
Lehrman Institute is about the history of the blues and jazz. It has this nice
list of links to music.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about
state capacity and the evolution of norms. I think it is safe to say many
economist historians regard both as essential to understanding long run
economic performance.
On state capacity, here is Koyama on Salter on Johnson and Koyama. And here is Koyama on Political Decentralization and Innovation
in early modern Europe and The Economist covers the work of
Anderson, Johnson and Koyama on poor harvests and violence.
On the evolution of norms:
Pseudoerasmus “Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come
From?” originally published as a blog post but recently published on Evonomics.
Peter Turchin writes that
“Cultural
Evolution is a new interdisciplinary field whose intellectual roots go back
only to the 1970s (unless, of course, you count Charles Darwin; but in a sense
any new development in evolutionary science can be traced to Darwin). In this
new field, “culture” is defined as information, which can affect human
behavior, that is socially transmitted—through books and manuals, by teaching,
or simply by observing and imitation. Cultural variants are information packages
that cause people to behave in alternative ways. Cultural Evolution, then,
studies how and why frequencies of cultural variants change with time, just as
biological evolution focuses on the changing frequencies of genetic variants.”
Of course North placed a great deal of
emphasis on the importance of changing beliefs (especially in Structure and Change
and later works) but this also reminds me of Veblen, who argued that “institutions
are, in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular
relations and to particular functions of the individual and of the community” and
that "the evolution of society is substantially a process of mental
adaption on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which
will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to
circumstances in the past." He argued that these prevalent habits of
thoughts influenced both the objectives that people sought to achieve and the
means that they perceived to achieve them. Consequently, their evolution should
be the primary concern of economists.
In addition, Jared Rubin and Murat Iyigun
have a paper on the Ideological Roots of Institutional Change
BTW there is actually a connection between the first link and the last link in this post.
Monday, July 17, 2017
The Importance of Honesty in Historical Research
I am not now, nor have I ever been a
fellow at the Mercatus Institute or any other institute that receives funding
from the Koch brothers. I have never received any funding from the Koch
brothers. To be honest, I haven’t received much funding from anyone else either.
I know several people at Mercatus (Mark Koyama, Noel Johnson, and John Nye),
and I have been there a couple of times when the Washington Area Economic
History Seminar was held there. I am not a libertarian, I have, in fact,
written several blog posts critical of libertarians generally as well as
specific people affiliated with Mercatus: Walter
Williams, Arnold
Kling, Bryan
Caplan and Tyler Cowen. Finally, I never met James Buchanan and if I have
ever cited him I can’t think of where it would be. I hope this establishes my
bona fides as not just another shill for the Koch brothers.
Now that I have gotten that out of
the way, I find the arguments that some historians are making in support of
Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains mindboggling.
MacLean quoting Cowen: “the weakening of checks and balances
would increase the chance of a very good outcome.”
Cowen’s full quote: “While the weakening of checks and
balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome, it also would
increase the chance of a very bad outcome.”
This is scholarly malpractice. Are
there really professors who would accept this from a student? It is indefensible,
yet Andy
Seal defends it:
This is the document in
question, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?” although there is also a second
version available on-line here. (That
becomes somewhat important, as you’ll see in a moment.) The crucial
sentence in question is—in full—the following: “While
the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good
outcome, it also would increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” When
MacLean quoted this sentence, she left out the “While” and the “it also would
increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Thus, in her book it appears as “the
weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good
outcome.”
Her critics see this as prima facie evidence of a bad faith effort to distort
Cowen’s meaning to make him appear to be anti-democratic. I think that’s
immediately debatable, however, because by her
lights any open-minded contemplation of the possibility of
weakening checks and balances is anti-democratic. And
that’s what Cowen is doing here: entertaining the possibility that weakening
checks and balances could produce a desirable outcome.
Let’s think about it this way. If I said,
“While permitting five-year-olds to be employed in manual labor would increase
the chance of a very good outcome, it also would increase the chance of a very
bad outcome,” what could we conclude? That I was advocating child labor?
No, that would be too much. But that I was open to the idea? Yes, that’s a fair
reading of the sentence.
He claims that her version of the quote does not show bad
faith “because by her lights any open-minded
contemplation of the possibility of weakening checks and balances is anti-democratic.”
But consider Seals’s example: “While
permitting five-year-olds to be employed in manual
labor would increase the chance of a very good outcome, it also would
increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Who believes that it would be
acceptable to quote him as saying: “permitting
five-year-olds to be employed in manual labor would increase the chance of a
very good outcome”? What if I told you that it is okay because in my lights
any open-minded contemplation of the possibility of child labor is supportive
of child labor? Would it be okay then?
This is not a small matter. I can’t
just brush this issue aside and look at her broader argument because I can't trust somone who does this. Her claims may very well be correct, but I am not going to be
persuaded by her argument because I can’t trust the evidence that she puts forward
in favor of them. I don’t care what a historian’s political leanings are, I need
to be able to trust that they are honestly representing their sources.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Internet Videos and Economic History
I frequently post videos related to economic history,
usually recordings of presentations at seminars or conferences. For the most
part I like being a professor at a liberal arts college, but I must admit I do
miss the seminars of a research university. There were economic history and
political economy seminars every week at Washington University when I was there.
Now I even find it difficult to get to the Washington Area Economic History
Seminar, which takes place once a month. Consequently, I really appreciate it
when people record and post such presentations.
There is another kind of economic history video: videos that
are meant specifically for instruction. Some of these simply record the
lectures that are presented in a regular economic history course. Two of these
that are pretty good are Greg Clark’s World
Economic History and Martha Olney’s
American Economic History.
There is yet another category of videos: videos created
which present interpretations of economic history created specifically for the
internet. I have looked at two such series recently. Unfortunately both have serious
problems of content and style.
One series is the videos associated with the EdX course on
the history of capitalism created by Edward Baptist and Louis Hyman the other
is a series of short videos presented at learnliberty.org.
Not surprisingly, the history of capitalism one is bar far
the worse. Thanks to these videos anyone with an internet connection can be misinformed
by Baptist for free. Take for instance his analysis of the Panic of 1837
in this video. There are so many things wrong with his presentation that I
plan to do a later post specifically about the Panic of 1837, but for now just
listen to the part that starts about 52 seconds in. He suggests that increases
in cotton output caused cotton prices to fall (be early 1836 they were creeping
down) and that this made cotton textile producers in England nervous. What? That’s
right cotton textile producers were nervous because the costs of production
were falling. If you are thinking that makes no sense, you are right. Not only
does this story not make sense it is factually incorrect. Cotton prices did not
start creeping down in early 1836; they were going up. Prices in New Orleans
remained over 14 cents a pound into early 1837. See Gray, Lewis Cecil.
"History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols.,
New York, 1941, Vol. 2 page 1027 or the price data available here at the
Center for International Price Research.) Prices plunged after the Panic, but
that doesn’t fit Baptist’s story. Baptist wants overproduction of cotton to
have caused the Panic.
Like Foghorn Leghorn, Baptist says “Don’t’ talk to me about
facts, son. I’ve already made up my mind.” As I mentioned earlier I’ll deal
with the rest of this story of the Panic later. In his book Baptist claimed
that slaves accounted for 1/5th of the nation’s wealth; in the video
on Northern and Southern Capitalism he ups it to 1/3 and adds the phrase “by
law,” as if there were a law declaring the percentage of wealth that would be
attributed of the value of slaves. In the video on Incentives and Slavery he again
claims that enslaved people used the phrase “pushing system.” But the estimates
about wealth are unfounded and the phrase pushing system was invented by Ed
Baptist, not enslaved people. (Please search scholar.google.com for papers by
Olmstead and Rhode on the New History of Capitalism.)
The problem with the Learn Liberty videos is more a problem
of emphasis. For instance, in the video on the
Civil War it states that slavery was the cause of the War but spends 4 of
the 5 minutes talking about tariffs and internal improvements. The video on the
Great Depression doesn’t talk about the role of the gold standard. It really
has too much some people think this and other people think that without any attempt
to evaluate what they think, as if all opinions are equally valid.
Of course, the videos
of seminar presentations that I like also do not provide all of the
documentation of a book or paper, but they are directed at an audience of
people that have expertise on the subject. Such an audience will be much more
likely to detect obvious bullshit like Baptist’s.
I said that there were problems with both content and style.
The problem with the style is that they do not make good use of the
visual medium. They are primarily one person talking to a camera. Baptist and
Hyman do, however, have a lot of books behind them: I guess they must know what
they are talking about. The Learn Liberty videos make some use of visuals, but
it is more eye candy to keep your attention than actual information. How some
graphs, maps, and tables. If you are going to go the trouble to produce a video
about economic history show us a how a spinning wheel and a spinning jenny worked.
Show us reaping by hand
and a mechanical reaper. Show
us what it is like to pick
cotton, and how a cotton gin worked. I’ve never understood how someone can
have a real sense of the industrial revolution without seeing some of these
things. As they exist now these talking to the camera videos are far inferior to books which provide more illustrations and documentation or good podcasts, which provide interaction between author and interviewer.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Nebraska, The Good Life
We spent the last week in Kearney, NE visiting family. Kearney
is easy to find; it is at the bottom of where the Platte dips south.
My parents
were both from Nebraska. We lived in south central Nebraska until we moved to
San Francisco when I was 10. My brother moved back after high school and my
parents moved back after my dad retired from the Coast Guard. I know many people consider Nebraska to be the
middle of nowhere, which would make Kearney the middle of the middle of nowhere,
but it is actually a great place to visit for anyone interested in American
history.
This week Mary and I went to the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in
Grand Island. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. Some things I learned on
this trip
1.
The first African American to play football at
the University of Nebraska, George
Flippin was the son of a former slave who had become a physician. George
Flippin also became a physician and founded the first hospital in Stromsburg,
NE.
2.
The first “successful” sugar
beet processing plant in the U.S. was established in Grand Island in 1889.
Here
is a video that will give you an idea of how much there is to see at the
Stuhr Museum.
If you are in the area you can also go about ten miles south
of I 80 to Minden, NE and see Pioneer
Village. Here is a video
that gives a small sample of the things you can see at Pioneer Village.
If you are traveling through Nebraska either museum is worth
the detour.
If you are interested in the history of the Great Plains they are
worth a trip.
P.S. the "Kear" in Kearney is pronounced like "car."
P.S. the "Kear" in Kearney is pronounced like "car."
The Golden Age of Economic History?
At Marginal
Revolution Tyler Cowen responded to a reader:
C. inquires:
Why do we live in the
golden age of economic history? Was there something identifiable that caused
the subfield to grow in esteem? Some new technology that changed the costs of
research (not that I can see)? Something else?
Mark Koyama should
write a Medium essay on this, but in the meantime here are my thoughts:
1. We now know much,
much more about the earlier economic
histories of China, India, and
some other locales. The rise of more and better graduate students from
the emerging economies, or for that matter from Europe, has been essential
here.
2. Some of the turn
toward economic history came with the financial crisis, and the search for
longer-term parallels, which meant looking back in history, most of all to the
Great Depression.
3. Although the
advance of cliometrics started a long time ago, we are now finally at intergenerational
margins where economic historians are as quantitatively well-equipped as most
parts of the applied micro spectrum.
4. The stranger the
time period, the more people will have to look to broader stretches of history
for understanding. Yes, this one is an uh-oh.
5. Some applied micro
fields have become a little more boring, so that has helped a partial shift of
status to economic history. Public data sets have been exhausted, and a
lot of economic history data sets are “weird or idiosyncratic” data sets, which
now are “in” and I predict will stay “in” for a long while to come because they
offer the possibilities of both new discoveries and moats.
6. An academic trend
that hasn’t yet been exploited usually ends up exploited, sooner or later, once
the right nudge comes along.
5b, 6b. In chess, the
top players are opting for the Giuoco Piano once again.
7. Competing economic
models are more “allowed” in the subfield — not everything must be neoclassical
— which has opened economic historians to more wide-ranging questions.
Economic history remains a good place to pursue the questions about economics
that initially interested many people as undergraduates.
8. Academic attention
is more media-driven these days, and good economic history papers usually have
a story of some kind, and perhaps also a historical personage, event, or
institution of broader interest.
The post prompted a lot of discussion on Twitter. My initial
response to the question is
1.
While I often argue that economic history is
doing very well, I’m not sure that this is the golden age. There is a lot of great work going on in economic history. Economic
historians are doing well at publishing in top journals, and many of the top
econ programs have strong fields in economic history. On the other hand, there
are still not a lot of economic history jobs in JOE. The problem with a golden
age is that it seems to imply that this is as good as it gets. I would still like to see more jobs
in economic history, more students studying economic history, and a wider
audience for good economic history. I would like for economic history to be more widely regarded as central to the study of economics. At the very least, I would like to see Washington University, where I studied with Doug North and John Nye, have economic history as a field again.
2.
I think there has been an important
technological change: the ability to take high quality digital photographs of
archival documents. This change has benefited history generally, but economic
history has probably benefited most. Archives used to be places where people
scribbled notes (with pencils). You were limited by how much time you could
afford to spend in the archive and how quickly you could scribble. Now,
archives are places where people take pictures, which can at relatively low
cost (thanks to software and the ability to offshore transcription) be converted
into text or data that you can analyze. Creating useable data sets from primary
sources is still difficult and time consuming, but less so than it used to be.
3.
I agree that the increase in the relative
importance of empirical work in economics has benefited economic history.
Donaldson’s Clark medal suggests a willingness to recognize good empirical work
regardless of the time or place it examines.
4.
There is a lot of interest in questions that
require us to look at history: long run growth, the productivity slow down,
inequality, racism, and financial crises. Of course, these things can and
should be analyzed with economic theory as well, but combined with the turn to
empirical analysis they present an opportunity for economic history.
5.
There has been an increase in popular interest
in economic history, but the work that has received the most attention (New
History of Capitalism) has often done more to misinform than to educate. I hope
an equivalent of Gresham’s law does not apply to economic history, but it
remains to be seen.
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Treasure Island
The New York Times reports on attempts to redevelop my old home. We moved to Treasure Island (T.I.) in 1973, when I was 10, and lived there until 1980. It was a Navy base, but most of it was occupied by housing for the families of enlisted men, mostly Navy, but also Coast Guard and Marines. Officers families lived on Yerba Buena Island. Yerba Buena Island (YBI), while Treasure built for the Golden Gate Exposition, a fair to celebrate the opening of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in 1939. TI was converted to a Navy base during the War. I don't remeber exactly when the base was decomissioned, but I think it was in the early '90s.
some interesting talks and a couple of articles
I’m surprised I had not come across these videos before. They
are from a conference at Williams College on Historical Persistence in Comparative Development. This was the lineup for the
conference
How Deep are the Roots of Economic Development?;
Fertility and Modernity
Enrico Spolaore, professor of economics at Tufts University
and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Forced Coexistence and Economic Development: Evidence
from Native American Reservations
Christian Dippel, assistant professor of economics in the
Global Economics and Management Group at the UCLA Anderson School of Management
4:30 p.m. Climate and the Slave Trade
James Fenske, associate professor in the Department of
Economics and deputy director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies
at the University of Oxford
8 p.m. Keynote Address: The Global Spatial Distribution
of Population and Economic Activity: Effects of Nature, History, and
Agglomeration
David Weil, James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics at
Brown University and research associate of the NBER
Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Development in the Americas
William Maloney, lead economist in the World Bank’s
Development Economic Research Group, former professor of economics at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development
Marcella Alsan, assistant professor of medicine at the
Stanford University School of Medicine, core faculty member at Stanford’s
Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research
Malthusian Dynamics and the Rise of the Poor Megacity
Dietrich Vollrath, associate professor of economics at the
University of Houston
“Unfinished
Business”: Historic Complementaries, Political Competition, and Ethnic Violence
in Gujarat
Saumitra Jha, associate professor of political economy at
the Stanford University Graduate School of Business
The European Origins of Comparative Development
Ross Levine, Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at
the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley
Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the
Nazi Party
Nico Voigtländer, assistant professor of economics in the
Global Economics and Management group at UCLA Anderson School of Management
The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa
Stelios Michalopoulous, assistant professor of economics at
Brown University, faculty research fellow at the NBER, external research
associate of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the
University of Warwick
Intergenerational Mobility and Institutional Change in
20th Century China
Noam Yuchtman, assistant professor in the Business and
Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of
California, Berkeley and faculty research fellow at the NBER
The videos of the talks can be found here
on youtube.
Here is Slave
Consumption in the Old South: A Double Edged Sword by Kathleen Hilliard at the American Historian
Erik Hilt’s Economic
History, Historical Analysis, and the “New History of Capitalism” in the June Journal of Economic History can be
accessed for free until the end of June
Friday, June 9, 2017
Some Recent Economic History
Podcasts
At the Economics Detective Jari Eloranta talks about war
in economic history, Nuno Palma talks about money,
trade, and economic growth, and Mark Koyama on State Capacity.
At Econtalk Christy Ford
Chapin talks to Roberts about the economic history of health care in the United
States.
Publications
At aeaweb.org Tim
Hyde describes the research of Hornbeck and Keniston on "Creative
Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872." June
2017 American Economic Review, 107(6): 1365-98
The most recent Journal
of Economic Literature contains a review by
Stanley Engerman of Edward Baptist’s The
Half Has Never Been Told and Clavin Schermerhorn’s the Business of Slavery
and the Rise of Capitalism. Pseudoerasmus noted on Twitter that Engerman is
largely repeating what some of us have been saying for more two years now. Unfortunately,
it appears that we need to keep repeating it. Too many historians continue to
not only turn a blind eye to the shoddy work in Baptist’s book but to actually
present it as an exemplar of historical research.
Blogs
At NEP-HIS Blog
Kenneth Pomeranz responds in two parts to the work of Deng and O’Brien on
measuring economic performance in Chinese history.
Andrew Batson blogs that "the divergence over the Great
divergence is narrowing"; he also provides a link to an April 2017 updated
version of Broadberry, Guan and Li “China,
Europe and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting,
980-1850
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Private provision of public goods
Maybe I am writing this too early in the morning to see what
I am missing here. I really mean that . I feel like I must be missing something. Alex Tabarok argues at Cato
Unbound that he has a private solution to the problem of public goods. The
setup for his example is that there is a bridge that will cost $800 to build and
will provide $100 benefit to each of ten people.
Now consider
a dominant assurance contract. An entrepreneur agrees to produce the public
good if and only if each of 10 people pay $80. If fewer than 10 people donate,
the contract is said to fail and the entrepreneur agrees to give a refund bonus
of $5 to each of the donors. Now imagine that potential donor A thinks that
potential donor B will not donate. In that case, it makes sense for A to
donate, because by doing so he will earn $5 at no cost. Thus any donor who
thinks that the contract will fail has an incentive to donate. Doing so earns
free money. As a result, it cannot be an equilibrium for more than one person
to fail to donate. We have only one more point to consider. What if donor A
thinks that every other donor will donate? In this case, A knows that if he
donates he won’t get the refund bonus, since the contract will succeed. But he
also knows that if he doesn’t donate he won’t get anything, but if does donate
he will pay $80 and get a public good which is worth $100 to him, for a net
gain of $20. Thus, A always has an incentive to donate. If others do not
donate, he earns free money. If others do donate, he gets the value of the
public good. Thus donating is a win-win, and the public good problem is solved.
The first part makes sense. If you do not think that others
will donate, then it is clear that you should donate and get the refund plus
the bonus. My problem is the second part in which he seeks to show that a person
always has an incentive to donate by arguing that he also knows that if he doesn’t donate he won’t get anything, but if
does donate he will pay $80 and get a public good which is worth $100 to him,
for a net gain of $20. Thus, A always has an incentive to
donate. Economists generally define a public good as one that is non-rival and
non-excludable. Non-rival means that your consumption does not diminish the benefit
that I gain from the good. The non-excludable part means that once the public
good is provided it is very costly to exclude people for consuming it.
Fireworks displays provide a relatively obvious example. The problem with Tabarrok’s argument is that
if it is a public good A can use it even if he does not pay. If he believes enough
others will contribute, his choice is between contribute $80 and get $100 benefit
(net $20) or pay nothing and get $100 benefit (net $100). If he does not get to use the bridge because
he did not contribute that mean the good is excludable. Thus at least in this example
the public good problem appears to be solved by assuming it away.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
McCurry on Slavery's Capitalism
Stephanie McCurry reviews Slavery’s Capitalism in the Times
Literary Supplement. She raises interesting questions about the
implications of the treatment of capitalism and slavery in the New History of
Capitalism. I, however, find myself in pretty much complete disagreement with
her about two of the essays.
She declares that
“Baptist's argument
about enslaved labour in cotton "labor camps" as bodily torture is
completely persuasive. Walter Johnson made a very similar case, also
powerfully, in River of Dark Dreams (2012). There is nothing to argue with
here. Neo-classical economic historians beg to differ and have taken Baptist to
task, insisting that efficiencies were the result of the introduction of
superior strains of cotton seed. That technical fight goes on, but it is
largely beside the point.”
I can’t figure out what she could possibly mean by “beside
the point.” Isn’t the point to create interpretations of the past based upon
the available evidence? That is what “the Neo-classical economists” have done
and Baptist has not. It has long been known that productivity in cotton
production was increasing. Why? Olmstead and Rhode collected a large amount of
evidence to try to answer the question. They concluded that slaveholders used
violence to coerce maximum effort from slaves and then used innovation in seeds
to increase the amount of cotton that could be produced from that maximum
effort. McCurry seems to simply buy Baptist’s lie that Olmstead and Rhode, as
well as other economists deny the role of violence in the system. I am not
going to repeat all the elements of the argument here, but you can read my
earlier blog post to see why I believe Baptist’s argument is about as far
away from persuasive as an essay can get. The bottom line is that Baptistic
history should never in anyway be encouraged. History needs a big sign that
says “Do Not Feed the Baptist.”
McCurry also writes that
“Slaves were not
compelled by the power of the dollar - that is to say of capital - but by the
whip.”
The problem with this statement is that the first part is
contradicted by a considerable amount of evidence. There is, of course, plenty
of evidence that the second part it true: slaves were motivated by the whip. But
there is also a lot of evidence rewards were used as well. I am sure that my
saying this will be taken out of context by some people and used to show that
economists don’t believe that slaves were tortured, but nothing could be
further from the truth. Whipping and other forms of physical assault were
obviously widely used. There is, however, plenty of evidence that rewards,
including money, were used as well. See, for instance, Kathleen Hilliard’s Master,
Slaves and Exchange. If I remember correctly A Slave No More
also has an interesting description of an arrangement in which John Washington
was hired out to a tobacco factory. His owner got a fixed payment, and
Washington got a piece rate for everything that he produced above a specified amount.
The point I am trying to make here is that, while we should never downplay the
brutality of slavery, it is also a disservice to the history of African
American people to deny the diversity of their experiences. Slave states
occupied a very large territory with diverse environments. If you include the
rest of the Americas the diversity is even greater. Slaves produced a wide
array of crops, manufactured a variety of goods, and performed many different
services. The one thing they all had in common is that they were not free. Even
if they were well treated, continuing in that condition depended on the
continuing goodwill of their master (not to mention his continuing good health
and economic success).
McCurry finds Baptist persuasive, but when John Majewski
asks
“why Republicans
opposed the expansion of slavery if the South was as capitalist, modern,
diversified, thriving and innovative as the North”
she finds that
The answer he offers
is not only unpersuasive; it provides a good basis for the contrary view. The
North, Majewski concludes, differed from even the most modern part of the South
in one important respect: "the democratization of education and
innovation". "Slavery created a political economy antithetical to
long-term development", which explained why Northern Republicans fought
the expansion of slavery into the territories. Far from securing the kind of
material and ideological convergence that is crucial to slavery's capitalism,
Majewski's argument, like Shankman's, seems to confirm that slavery could
generate enormous profit for Northerners while retaining a distinct political
economy that served as a brake on national capitalist development.
Majewski provides considerable evidence that even in areas
along the border with very similar geography, slave states invested less in
education and produced less innovation. He shows that Republicans were aware of
these differences and regarded them negatively.
McCurry does not provide any evidence to contradict this
argument. She declares that
the critical issue in
1860 was not that Republicans saw slavery as a problem, but that slaveholding
Southerners saw free labour and industrial capitalism as an existential threat.
The slaveholders had once called the shots in US politics. But by 1860 the
slave South was not the leading edge of anything except pro-slavery
nationalism. It seceded and provoked a civil war over the future of the nation
and of slavery in it.
But wasn’t it both? If Republicans had not opposed the
spread of slavery into new territories, would Southerners have viewed them as a
threat to the existence of slavery?
Gavin Wright’s review for EH.net remains the most insightful review of Slavery’s
Capitalism
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Quick Take on Bankers and Empire
I just finished reading Peter James Hudson’s Bankers
and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean
Here
is John Clegg interviewing Hudson for the Brooklyn Rail.
Here is a New
Dawn podcast of Hudson talking to Michael Dawson about the book.
Hudson describes the activities of America’s most important
financial firms in the Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. I have been looking forward to reading the book because he studies
many of the same firms that I have studied in my work on trust companies. (Institutions,
Entrepreneurs and American Economic History: How the Farmers Loan and Trust
company Shaped the Laws of Business:
1822-1929; “A
Failure of Regulation?: Reinterpreting the Panic of 1907,” Business History Review October 2014; and
“Trust Company Failures and Institutional Change in New York, 1875-1925,” Enterprise
and Society forthcoming). He is also looking at roughly the same period
that I do, but he asks very different questions.
Hudson wants to understand how the actions of these firms in
the Caribbean were shaped by the combination of racism and the profit motive. He writes about racial capitalism, but do not confuse this book book with Baptist and Beckert style New History of Capitalism. They make grand
claims and portray their work as the result of intense archival research, but
their overblown claims are constructed from a secondary literature that is either
misrepresented or concealed, and the archival references are ornamental. Hudson,
in contrast, tells a story that is built from the ground up using primary
sources. It is a messy story, because that is the story that emerges from the wide
array of primary sources that he uses. I thought this quote from the interview
with Clegg provided a nice description of my impression of the book:
I think it has helped
me to understand that the project of “U.S. imperialism” was contingent, marked
by an incomplete hegemony, often notable for its confusion, experimentation,
and failure, defined through competing interests, and rarely triumphalist. This
is not to say that it didn’t exist—or that its effects in the Caribbean, and
elsewhere, were not palpable, bloody, or real. But there was always pushback
and, while the U.S. state often served as the intermediary for U.S. capital
in the Caribbean, oftentimes government officials tried to be a brake on the
activities of banks if they felt they were not in the strategic and economic
interests of the state. Before I began this project I don’t think I was aware
of the role of law and regulation in mediating the relation between banking and
imperialism. More often than not, banking expansion was an attempt to evade,
erode, or re-write the federal regulations governing banking activity.
The bankers in the book both compete and cooperate. They see
the potential for profit, but ignorance and prejudice often leave them stumbling
around trying to get hold of it. There are profits, but there are also
failures. They try to use both U.S. and foreign governments to their advantage,
but not always successfully. They see themselves as constrained by the law, while
also trying to change the law and take advantage of operating under multiple
legal regimes. The book reminded me of the end of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters, where he describes
sitting in his office, surrounded by piles of papers, trying to figure out what
it all meant, because the story he had found did not fit into existing
narratives about the role of law.
I’ll admit that the economist in me sometimes wanted a
little more about the quantitative significance of the firms’ actions. In
addition, although the references to the secondary literature, including
business history, are extensive, Hudson does not address more social science
oriented history. There has been a lot of recent work on institutions and
financial development in history, including Latin America and the Caribbean (especially
work by Haber and his students), and I’ll have to give more thought to how
Hudson’s story relates to this work.
Those issues aside, however, the book tells an interesting
story, and I love Hudson’s commitment to building a stories from the primary
sources. Moreover, as someone who has written about the same characters, the
stories rang true to me. I have tried to tell very different stories about
these firms, but his descriptions of them and the people who ran them sounded
like the firms and the people that I found in the sources.
Friday, May 26, 2017
Loan Sharks
The Exchange,
the blog of the Business History Conference, posted a list of new books of
interest, and I noticed Loan Sharks: The
Birth of Predatory Lending by Charles Geisst, published by the Brookings
Institution. I hadn’t heard about the book before, but I was curious since
there has been a lot of interesting work on loan sharks in the last decade or
so. I was particularly interested to see if he cited my work with Mary Eschelbach
Hansen ("The
evolution of garnishment and wage assignment law in Illinois." Essays
in Economic & Business History 32 (2014): 19-46). I looked Geisst’s
book up on Google books and did a quick search. Our paper did not show up in
the search.
I assumed he must cite Anne Fleming ("The
borrower's tale: a history of poor debtors in Lochner Era New York City." Law
and History Review 30, no. 04 (2012): 1053-1098 or "City of
Debtors: Law, Loan Sharks, and the Shadow Economy of Urban Poverty,
1900–1970." Enterprise & Society 17, no. 4 (2016):
734-740.) But she did not show up in the
search either.
Michael Easterly ("Your Job is Your Credit: Creating a
Market for Loans to Salaried Employees in New York City, 1885-1920." The
Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2 (2010): 463-468).
Bruce Carruthers, Timothy Guinnane and Yoonseuk Lee ("Bringing
“honest capital” to poor borrowers: The passage of the US Uniform Small Loan
Law, 1907–1930." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42,
no. 3 (2012): 393-418).
Louis Hyman (Debtor
Nation: The History of America in Red Ink).
Lendol Calder (Financing
the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit).
I couldn’t find any mention of any of them.
I was beginning to think that the search function must not
be working, then I searched for Geisst and there were numerous hits.
Perhaps the search in Google books is flawed. I hope that is the case. Maybe it only
finds the name of the author. If the search is not flawed, I am puzzled how
someone can write a book that does not cite any of the recent research on the
topic. I assume from the low price that the book is aimed at something wider
than a purely academic audience, but I’m not asking for a detailed
historiography, just some references to relevant work.
Monday, May 8, 2017
Two Awards and Two Conferences
Between end of the semester grading and trying to work on the book on the history of bankruptcy that Mary Eschelbach Hansen and I are writing I haven't found much time to blog lately, but here are a few economic history things worth noting.
Two Awards
Dave Donaldson won the John Bates Clark Medal. Although the
prize
committee’s statement does not refer to him as an economic historian, it
emphasizes important work that he has done on historical topics. Most of his
papers are available here at
his website. Here
is a Q &A with the Wall Street Journal
Naomi
Lamoreaux was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Business History
Conference.
Two Conferences
The program
for the annual meeting of the Economic and Business History Society.
The program
the NBER Summer Institute 2017 Development of the American Economy. Be sure to
check back later because only two papers are linked right now,
Now back to the history of bankruptcy.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Runaway Slave Ads
I am putting up this link to a blogpost from last year because of an article in the Washington Post about Ed Baptist's project to digitize runaway slave ads. The article quotes Baptist and, not surprisingly, does not mention that several people have already done what he claims to be doing.
Fugitive Slave Ads and the Runaway New History of Capitalism
Fugitive Slave Ads and the Runaway New History of Capitalism
Credit Relationships and Business Bankruptcy during the Great Depression
here is an interesting new paper by my favorite economic historian, Mary Eschelbach Hansen, and her
co-author Nicholas Ziebarth.
Hansen, Mary Eschelbach and Nicolas L. Ziebarth. 2017. "Credit
Relationships and Business Bankruptcy during the Great Depression." American
Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 9(2): 228-55.
Abstract
“Credit relationships are sticky. Stickiness makes
relationships beneficial to borrowers in times of their own distress but makes
them potentially problematic when lenders themselves face hardship. To examine
the role of credit relationships during a financial crisis, we exploit a
natural experiment in Mississippi during the Great Depression that generated
plausibly exogenous differences in financial distress for banks. Using new data
drawn from the publications of the credit rating agency Dun & Bradstreet
and from original bankruptcy filings, we show that financial distress increased
business exit but did not increase the bankruptcy rate. Financial distress
caused both banks and trade creditors to recalibrate their collections
strategies, which is revealed by changes in the geographical distribution of
the creditors of bankrupt businesses.”
Saturday, April 15, 2017
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