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

Economic History Seminars
Speakers in our seminar series this year include Neil Cummins, Kris Mitchener, Eric Schneider, James Fenske and Rui Esteves.
The full programme is found here.

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Call for Papers
The 2015 INFINITI conference is taking place 8-9 June in Ljubljana. Papers presented at the conference are eligible for consideration in a special issue of Explorations in Economic History, which will be edited by Ronan Lyons, Charles Larkin and John Turner. The theme of the special issue is "Financial Crises and Economic Stability - Historical Perspectives".

The special issue call is as follows: While developments in recent years have underscored the important links between financial crises and economic stability, the past three centuries contain many episodes of local and wider financial crises and how they affected real economic outcomes. Papers examining this rich history, particularly ones utilising detailed historical data, are welcomed.

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New Research Network
A new network on the economics and history of crime and conflict was set up in Belfast in September 2014, at workshop in Crumlin Road Gaol.
More details are found here.

New Research

• Alan Fernihough's new article on mixed marriages in pre-partition Ireland is published by Explorations in Economic History. A press release about his work is available here.
• John Turner and Gareth Campbell each have chapters in a newly-published Oxford University Press book on British financial crises since 1825. John writes on the role of extended shareholder liability, while Gareth looks at the Railway Mania.
• Graham Brownlow's new QUCEH working paper on the De Lorean uses Janos Kornai's ideas about Soft Budget Constraints to explain the rise and fall of this iconic motor company.
• Graham Brownlow's forthcoming Business History article, entitled 'Back to the Failure: An Analytic Narrative of the De Lorean Debacle', explains the failure of the De Lorean Motor Company Limited as a failure in activist industrial policy.
• Arcangelo Dimico's new QUCEH working paper, entitled 'Poverty Trap and Educational Shock: Evidence from Missionary Fields', examines the long-run impact of Christian missions on African economic development.
• John Turner's new book, Banking in Crisis, tells the story of the rise and fall of British banking stability over the past two centuries, shedding new light on why banking systems crash and on the factors underpinning banking stability.
• Qing Ye and John Turner's new QUCEH working paper analyses 1,015 stocks traded on the London Stock Exchange between 1825 and 1870 using modern portfolio analysis methods.
• Chris Colvin, Abe de Jong and Philip Fliers's updated working paper on the banking failures in the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s is now available as a QUCEH working paper.
• John Turner's chapter for a forthcoming OUP handbook on banking and financial history addresses the relationship between financial economics and financial history. The chapter is now available as a QUCEH working paper.
• A new working paper by Arcangelo Dimico quantifies the economic impact of the Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century. He finds that the partition of ethnic groups did not itself matter for development; it mattered only when the partitioned groups were relatively small and therefore lacked political representation.
• 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.

More research by QUCEH members