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

Why Ireland Starved After Three Decades
2 May 2014
Speakers: Peter Solar, Cormac Ó Gráda, Liam Kennedy and Joel Mokyr
Full programme
New Hires in Economic History

Matthias Blum will be joining Queen's as a Lecturer in Economics in September 2014 from Technische Universität München, where he is currently a postdoc in the Department of Agricultural and Food Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from Universität Tübingen and his research interests are development economics and economic history, especially anthropometric history.

Alan de Bromhead will be joining Queen’s as a Lecturer in Economics in July 2014 from the University of Oxford, where he is currently completing his DPhil in Economic and Social History. His research interests are in economic history, political economy and globalisation.

Alan Fernihough has joined Queen's as a Lecturer in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, where he was 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.

Recent research by QUCEH members

  • 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.
  • 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.
More research by QUCEH members