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

Call for Papers: Long-Run Perspectives on Crime and Conflict
QUCEH invites submissions to an interdisciplinary workshop on the economics and history of crime and conflict, to take place at Crumlin Road Gaol on Friday 12 September 2014. The deadline for this call is Friday 18 July 2014. 
More details can be found here.

Events

Book Launch and Inaugural Lecture
Speaker: John Turner, Professor of Finance and Financial History, QUB
Title: Banking in Crises: The Rise and Fall of British Banking Stability
Date and time: 11 September 2014, 17:00-18:00
Location: Isdell Courtyard, Riddel Hall

New Hires

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. 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 has joined Queen’s as a Lecturer in Economics from the University of Oxford, where he is 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.

New Research

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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