The current literature on the causes of the Austrian financial crisis in 1931 emphasises both foreign and domestic factors. This article offers new data to analyse this issue. Its findings reinforce the importance of a domestic factor in bringing about the crisis: universal banks’ exposure to industrial enterprises, which were the universal banks’ main borrowers and creditors. During the 1920s, these industrial enterprises failed to perform well, rendering the universal banks insolvent. The Credit-Anstalt, which became an ‘acquirer of last resort’ for three other universal banks during the 1920s, was insolvent as early as 1925. The bank, however, could have avoided bankruptcy had it been spared the burden of Unionbank's non-performing assets.

This article seeks to analyze the cocoa circuits during the final years of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the transition towards independence and the beginning of the world cocoa crisis in 1820. Added to the traditional circuits of Guayaquil and Maracaibo linked with Pamplona, the article identifies circuits that were speculated to exist in the southwest of New Granada, but because they did not move large volumes, they were not considered for production statistics. These small productions supplied the domestic market, also exported or integrated into circuits from other places that had better interactions in international markets. It is not a microhistory of cocoa in remote regions, it is the history of a cocoa overshadowed by the visibility of others.

This article shows that neither stock markets nor commercial banks had a significant impact on the UK's economic growth from 1850 to 1913. These results are based on a new dataset on paid-in capital of securities listed on the UK's stock exchanges, which is analysed using a vector autoregression with time-varying parameters. Econometric results also indicate that the growth of the banking sector and the capital markets was, to a significant extent, driven by factors other than domestic economic growth.

This article provides the first series of adult male height for 19th-century Chile. Our aim was not only to assess the trends indicated by height during this period, but also the relationship between stature and both GDP per capita and exports. Having analysed our data, our primary conclusion is that there was a reduction in height for cohorts born in the 1850s and 1860s with respect to cohorts born between 1820 and 1840. Height stagnated thereafter, with small to no improvement towards the end of the 19th century, in line with other Latin American countries for which there is comparable evidence. The increase in per capita GDP and exports during the second half of the century did not result in better biological welfare, as was the case in other Latin American countries during similar export booms.

Legislation that required the registration of firms’ anticompetitive agreements (cartel registers) to reveal, and sometimes regulate, anticompetitive behavior was relatively common in many nations before 1975. Examining the introduction of these registers in sixteen mostly OECD countries between 1920 and 2000 reveals which industries and sectors appeared to minimize successfully the impact of the legislation in their jurisdiction. We find considerable variation, but in most countries, the agriculture and export sectors were especially successful in avoiding or delaying the application of a register in their areas of interest.

By the start of the twentieth century, the two organizational forms most used by Dutch banks to raise capital through the dispersal of their ownership were the cooperative association and the public company. Share ownership in cooperatives was typically restricted to customers, while companies permitted outside investors. Neither organizational form dictated specific shareholder liability arrangements. New specialist banks targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) combined these two organizational forms and flexible liability rules to create hybrid forms. I find those that took the public company form were more likely to suffer distress during the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s. Liability arrangements for shareholders, by contrast, had a negligible impact on these banks’ resilience.

In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.