Welcome to Queen's University Centre for Economic History

Queen's University Centre for Economic History (QUCEH) is an interdisciplinary research centre based at Queen's University Management School, Queen's University Belfast. It brings together faculty and graduate students working on the economic study of the past from across the university and elsewhere.

Announcements

New Hire in Economic History

Alan Fernihough is joining Queen's as a Lecturer in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, where he is currently a postdoc at the Institute for International Integration Studies. He holds a PhD in Economics from University College Dublin and his research interests include economic history, demography and economic growth. He is currently working on the role of coal in the Industrial Revolution, and the macroeconomics of the Great Depression.
EABH New Scholars Workshop
16 April 2014

Keynote speaker: Joost Jonker (Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht)

Provisional programme

Recent research by QUCEH members

  • A new working paper by Matthias Blum, Chris Colvin, Laura McAtackney and Eoin McLaughlin exploits the frequency at which age data from prison registers heap at round ages to infer people’s ability to count for the case of Ireland in the nineteenth-century. In particular, the paper reassesses patterns of female numeracy and finds women to have had lower levels of education attainment than previously thought.
  • Matthias Beck's co-authored book on risk examines the origins of the concept, and how the politics of risk has changed its meaning across history. The first chapter of the book is available free from the publisher.
  • Using a large new dataset of nearly 1,000 British firms in the second half of the 19th century, Graeme Acheson, Gareth Campbell, John Turner and Nadia Vanteeva find that voting and control rights were diffuse by modern-day standards, undermining the influential law and finance hypothesis. Their working paper is being distributed using the new EABH Working Paper Series, EABH Papers.
  • Why did imitations of Raiffeisen’s rural cooperative savings and loans associations work well in some European countries, but fail in others? Chris Colvin and Eoin McLaughlin answer this question with a comparative study of Ireland and the Netherlands, available in Early View at the Economic History Review.
  • In a new article published in the Journal of Economic History in September 2013, Christopher Coyle and John Turner examine the role of creditor protection in the development of the UK corporate bond market and find that law does not explain the variation in the size of this market over time.
  • How can interlocking directorates cause financial instability for universal banks? A detailed history of the Rotterdamsche Bankvereeninging in the 1920s by Chris Colvin, available in Early View in Business History, answers this question in a case study.
  • Matthias Beck's new monograph, The Elusive Search for Job Security: A Historical Inquiry into Dismissals in the United States Workplace, explains the historical reasons for American exceptionalism with regards to the legal protection of workers. The book, which is a mixture of business, legal and economic history, looks at the linkages between disorganised labour and the long-run success of American capitalism.
  • John Turner's new article introducing a special issue of Business History on the law and finance hypothesis in history, co-edited with Aldo Musacchio (HBS), is available on Early View.
More research by QUCEH members