by Andrea Brandolini (andrea.brandolini@bancaditalia.it) and Giovanni Vecchi (giovanni.vecchi@uniroma2.it)

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:workqs:qse_19&r=his

Abstract 

The paper describes the evolution of the well-being of the Italians during the 150 years since the country’s unification. The progress in material standard of living was substantial, with GDP per capita growing 13 times between 1861 and 2010 and hours of work (and hence effort) falling considerably, but was roughly in line with that experienced by most other European countries. By relying on a novel database on household budgets, the paper shows that economic growth was accompanied by a long-run reduction of inequality that appears however to have been reversed in the last two decades. Progress was not limited to the economic domain: educational attainment improved considerably, although less than in other countries; on the other hand, the increase in life expectancy was spectacular and brought Italians to lead the international ranking.”

“Comparative Advantages in Italy: A Long-run Perspective”

by Giovanni Federico (giovanni.federico@eui.eu) and Nikolaus Wolf  (nikolaus.wolf@wiwi.hu-berlin.de)

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:workqs:qse_9&r=his

Abstract

The history of Italy since her unification in 1861 reflects the two-way relationship between foreign trade and economic development. Its growth was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the country’s integration with European and global commodity markets: foreign trade in the long run grew on average faster than the overall economy. Behind the dynamics of aggregate trade, Italy’s comparative advantage changed fundamentally over the last 150 years. The composition of trade, in terms of both commodities imported and exported and in terms of trading partners, developed from a high concentration of a few trading partners and a handful of rather simple commodities into a wide diversification of trading partners and more sophisticated commodities. In this chapter we use a new long-term database on Italian foreign trade at a high level of disaggregation to document and analyze these changes. We will conclude with an assessment of Italy’s prospects from a historical perspective.”

Review by: Anna Missiaia

In 2011 the Bank of Italy promoted an extensive research project to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Unification of the country. The project focused on the various aspects of the economic history of Italy since 1861. The goal was to cast light on the economic and social development of unified Italy and on Italy’s position in the world today. The project involved an impressive number of prominent scholars (mostly historians, economic historians and economists) both Italian and international.  The results of the research project were presented at the international conference held at the Bank of Italy in Rome from 12 to 15 October 2011. The project included twenty studies, most of these coauthored by Italian and non-Italian scholars (all of which were distributed by nep-his on 2011 12 19). The topics analyzed included: productivity and wealth, technology, production specialization, business internationalization, human capital, social capital, trade, migration, legal system, regional divergence, financial system and public finance, political economy. All the works presented adopt a long run perspective, embracing all the 150 years of unitary history of Italy. One of the most interesting results of this project was the revision of Italian historical statistics and the release of new historical series of the main national accounts aggregates. All the working papers presented at the conference are available from the website of the Bank of Italy.

Here we propose to comment on two contributions that were presented at the conference. The first one is “ The Well-Being of Italians: A Comparative Historical Approach” by Andrea Brandolini and Giovanni Vecchi which is concerned with measures of standard of living of the Italian population over 150 years. The second paper is “Comparative Advantages in Italy: A Long-run Perspective” by Giovanni Federico and Nikolaus Wolf which is concerned with the relationship between foreign trade and economic development in Italy.

Brandolini and Vecchi propose an overview of measures of standard of living that go beyond GDP per capita, including new estimates made available within the project. First of all, they show new estimates of income per capita recently released by Banca d’Italia, ISTAT and University of Rome Tor Vergata. They then compare these with the updated international series by Maddison. The result is that Italy lagged behind until WWII, after which the big catch up took place resulting in an overall increase by a factor of 13. The two scholars then propose a measure that takes account of the economies of scales in consumption: GDP per equivalent person. This measure takes into account of the household size, allowing to consider pooling benefits. The difference between the two series are large at the beginning of the period and shirk over time because of the reduction of household size. On worked time, third measure of well-being proposed here, they find that the number of hours worked decreased dramatically. The most interesting result is that child work decreased as well during industrialization, which is a result that makes Italy different from other industrializing countries like Belgium, the US and the UK. The next step is to look at inequality over the 150 years. For this purpose, they use the data available from the Italian Household Budget Database. As for inequality, the experience of Italy seems to be different from other countries such as the US and the UK: inequality, measured through the Gini and the Atkinson indices, decreased until the 1980s, with a resumption in the last 30 years. The last measures proposed are life expectancy, anthropometric measures and the Human Development Index (HDI). Life expectancy rose dramatically over the 150 years at a higher pace compared to that of other industrializing countries. This was due to a great improvement of health conditions. Heights appear to be negatively affected by industrialization, showing once again the difference between Italy and the others. The performance of the HDI is quite poor, mostly because of the slow increase in school enrollment rates. Concluding, the main features of the development of well-being of Italians between 1861 and today is an increase in GDP in line with that of other Western countries and a decreasing inequality and longevity/health in spite of industrialization.  

The second paper reviewed here deals with assessment of the evolution of the comparative advantage of Italy in international trade. The common wisdom at the time of unification was that Italy should have focused on exporting primary rather than manufacturing goods. Federico and Wolf use a new dataset on Italian trade to show how comparative advantage of Italy changed over the 150 years. The dataset as been constructed within a project funded by Banca d’Italia and provides systematic information on Italian trade from 1862 onwards. The authors calculate comparative advantages through the index of Revealed Comparative Advantage for each type of product. Intuitively, for each of these they measure the difference between the product’s normalized net balance and the total normalized net balance. If the index is positive, there is a comparative advantage in that type of export. The result is a shift in the comparative advantage of Italy from primary goods to manufacturing around the 1920s. This result is interesting as it shows that Italy achieved this shift earlier than previously thought and it managed to reverse the expectations at the time of Unification. Federico and Wolf also comment on the change of trading partners that Italy experienced over the period, starting with a 90% of exports towards Europe and ending with a much higher degree of openness towards the rest of the world.

In conclusion, the research project promoted by the Bank of Italy for the 150^th anniversary of Unification was a very fruitful opportunity for economic historians. Existing series have been revised and expanded, giving great opportunities for new research in a number of related fields. The two working papers reviewed here are only two examples of the use of these data.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:34704&r=his

Abstract
How many economic historians are there in the world? In which countries or world regions are they concentrated? Can we explain differences in the number of economic historians who are participating in world congresses, and which determinants encourage or limit participation propensity? Using an e-mail questionnaire, we analyse the global situation of this discipline. Overall 59 countries were available to be surveyed in this overview. We estimate the overall number of economic historians in the world to be around 10,400 scholars.

Joerg Baten and Julia Muschallik offer a worthwhile account of the state of economic history as a discipline today. Their effort to establish its distribution around the wold as well as estimating the number of participants in the field is significant and convincing. A number of interesting challenges had to be sorted to arrive at this estimates and cross checking by aggregating through annual conferences and journal publications reinforces the message. But perhaps these estimates could have been more convincing if they had considered the distribution and authorship of working papers distributed by nep-his or SSRN.

This paper opens a number of interesting debates. First, it has made clear we know little as to the actual emergence and evolution of the discipline around the world. There is thus an opportunity to report how and why economic historians became self aware, establish themselves as an area of knowledge and its teaching and research was adopted in different counties. A history of the discipline and its participants if you like.

Secondly, there is an issue about how they dealt with different “tribes”. Establishing the limits of your search always has to deal with “gray areas”. Baten and Muschallik argue that it is in countries with high degree of specialisation such as the US and the UK where business and economic historians can be identified as separate groups. But precisely because economic history combines methods and rhetorical styles of other disciplines, there could have been a bit more sensitivity in the questionnaire to those which feed from economic history and vice versa, namely to allow respondents to identify if they felt to the part of (or actually being active in) business history, marketing history, accounting history and increasingly some within critical management studies. Of course, if according to Baten and Muschallik economic historians are indeed something of a “luxury product”, then what are these other people/areas?

Thirdly, I found the link between the number of academics in a country and its GDP particularly interesting. Coming back to my theme above of a history of the discipline, this opens up questions such as why has specialisation taken place? Why and when did this happen? Is there collaboration or antagonism between these groups? But as mentioned, the line has to be drawn somewhere and answering these sort of questions was not their intent.

Finally, to items for further reflection: a) it will be interesting to see the extent to which, ceteris paribus, their predictions on participants to the World Congress in South Africa are on the mark. b) I was quite happy to see their estimates of total economic historians around the world at 10.5k people, specially as of today nep-his has about 6.5k unique subscribers.

PS Have a look at:

New Bloomberg Economic & Business History Blog, “Echoes”.

http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wes:weswpa:2011-004

[No abstract by author]

If you have ever come across any of my publications, you’ll know I was bound to comment on this one.

Without the benefit of an abstract by the author, I’ll summarise the paper briefly: this is a contribution to Parker & Wharple’s The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History and rather than an original piece, it reads as an abridged version of Grossman’s Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800 – see his blog.

As the latter suggests and after a haphazard introduction on the economics of financial intermediation, the thrust of the story deals with developments since the 19th Century. Throughout the piece there are inconsistencies in the use of “bank” as it sometimes refers to commercial banking activities (i.e. deposit taking and management of payment systems) and others at investment banking (i.e. financing firms). From the outset there is certainly great concern with the way surplus funds are made available to firms in the “real economy” rather than why capitalism developed institutions to manage payment systems, help to accumulate savings and provide credit to individuals, governments and firms.

I am no fan of populist versions of the history of financial institutions (e.g. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money), but the broad stroke account of how banking emerged in Medieval and Renaissance Europe is unconvincing. For instance, there is only a superficial discussion of how for quite a long time there was no clear distinction between financial and commercial activities, with firms providing credit to customers and suppliers as part of their everyday activities (e.g. cases of Madrid and Barcelona based firms during the 17th and 18th centuries documented by J. Carles Maixé-Altés).

Throughout the paper, there is a blurring line between financing firms and individuals; whilst there is no reference to alternative forms of governance such as government owned banks, mutual and co-operative financial institutions (of which, admittedly, Mark Billings and I are to publish a special edition of Business History – with a foreword by Jonathan Michie ). Hence a lost opportunity to mention of early forms to finance individuals such as savings banks (1810 in Scotland) and building societies (1770s – Birmingham). To be fair, focusing on the for-profit model is a common oversight of US-authored histories of financial intermediation. But as a result, there is no acknowledgment that these were often the first financial institutions subject to strict and detailed control by the state (for instance building societies in 1833 and savings banks even earlier – see my recent piece with Masayoshi Noguchi). More could have been made of different attitudes to thrift and usury laws in Catholic and Protestant Europe (e.g. the work of Chris Colvin or Timothy Guinnane), John Turner’s and others work on “free banking” as well as made some allowances to developments outside of Europe and the US, such as the early use of fiat money in China.

We are told that “economic history suggests that securities markets are more efficient intermediators.” (p. 2) but not explained why or how come large economies such as Germany, Japan and Spain relied on a financial institutions rather than markets to finance economic growth. There was a need to explain how and why market let finance takes prominence from say 1970 and particularly during the 1980s, even in the afore mentioned nations.

On the whole, Grossman comes across as “whiggish history” or an inevitable progression to the large, diversified, multinational/global, “bank”. It was rather disappointing that this is neither a state of the art review nor a proper historiography of financial intermediation, commercial or investment banking; a map of how different institutions and/or markets emerged and developed. This is not, in any way, to under estimate his account of post 1800 developments and particularly those of the early 20th Century. Here Grossman’s command of the area is evident but clearly contrast with the rather weak start and end of his story.

CEPR URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8534&r=his

[Earlier version - free download : http://ideas.repec.org/p/ecj/ac2003/219.html ]

Understanding the development of chainstores is important given the large GDP share of services and the continuing importance of chains in bringing these services to market. Service chains provide a puzzle because they take a long time to develop even when there are obvious expansion opportunities. We study the spread of McDonalds in Britain. We find cannibalization on the demand side and economies of density both within and between markets on the cost side, and evidence of learning by doing at the firm level. Within-period diseconomies of scale at the firm level help explain the lengthy opening pattern.

Keywords: Cost of entry; diffusion; economies of density; economies of scale; entry; expansion

JEL: L10

Business historians have explored retailing in different forms (such as food in supermarkets and financial services by banks). This article, however, opens a potentially interesting side to the story. Toivanen and Waterson’s tell how McDonald’s entered the UK market in 1974 and follow through until 1990, when Burger King arrives.Theirs is primarily a story of industrial organization. The company provided data on new outlets (few of which were franchises) and this was matched to geo-economic information that results in a fascinating analysis of growth (by measuring how market size attracts different size of entry).

Placing a similar study in its context and cultural implications could be an interesting business history, as well as the dynamics of the competition with the incumbent, Whimpy. Of course, why Whimphy failed to respond appropriately is another part of the story. However, I think the greatest potential Toivanen and Waterson offer to business historians is the linking of retailing studies with “big issues” such as the roots of obesity.

Obesity is an increasing concern for policy makers. For instant, the recent article in The Economist. It a problem of global impact as it seems to be growing faster in less developed countries (says BBC News). Actions of government seem ineffective and some even open to ridicule (such as a direct path to a fast foor resaurant as discribed by Piquant Salty Humour).But academic input from historians seems marginal and perhaps limited to the work of Sander L. Gilman.

CEPR URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8513&r=his

Free to download URL: http://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/file/DP8513.pdf

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor. We also analyse interactions with various economic and political variables. While autocracies and democracies show a broadly similar responses to budget cuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to see unrest as a result of austerity measures. Growing media penetration does not lead to a stronger effect of cut-backs on the level of unrest.

Keywords: demonstrations; Europe; government deficits; instability; public expediture; riots; unrest

JEL: H40

There are a number of competing arguments in use to explain the August 2011 riots in London (e.g. BBC News or Tony Blair in The Observer). In a timely piece, Ponticelli and Voth provide empirical support to the debate.

That one should expect some form of that causality between cut-backs in government expenditure and social unrest is probably part of the curriculum of “Politics 101″. The question is by who much. Here Olaf Storbeck’s Ecomics Intelligence noted that, according to Ponticelli and Voth, the relationship has lost strength in the last 20 years needs more attention and that the authors could have expanded in the reasons for this. Perhaps more interestingly, is testing for when and how. For instance, riots in Greece take place when cuts are announced and in London in anticipation of a reduction of police numbers. In this regard Ponticelli and Voth explore “the spread of (uni-directional) mass media” (such as newspapers, television and radio) as opposed to the use of social networks (bi-directional media) in the so called Arab Spring and London riots.

Overall, they offer a robust dataset, a sound estimation and a convincing explanation that budget cuts have a stronger correlation with unrest than changes in GDP:

These findings cast doubts on established wisdom. Until the sovereign debt crisis of 2010, the consensus among economists was unambiguous – expenditure cuts can be growth-enhancing. Also, there was a widely accepted view that there is no penalty at the ballot box for cuts. Governments that implement huge austerity programmes are just as likely to win as the ones doing nothing. While recent research by the IMF casts some doubt on the economic benefits, our results question the political economy side of the story – cuts may not imperil re-election, but they create the risk of major social and political instability.(The Guardian)

There are some methodological issues that need clarification. For instance, what exactly do authors mean by “countries institutions improve”. There is no allowance for the timing of announcements as their data uses actual reductions in government spending. It is also debatable to construct a single index of unrest (whether a simple or weighted index as noted in footnote 6) as opposed to a panel. How different are results when comparing Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia? But more important, as the authors point out, there might be space for more micro analysis when testing unrest in particular cities (see their summary at Vox) rather than national economies. These and many other questions remain open. It seems that Ponticelli and Voth make an important contribution to researching the economics of unrest.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:fsfmwp:166&r=his

Mobile banking is growing at a remarkable speed around the world. In the process it is creating considerable uncertainty about the appropriate regulatory response to this newly emerging service. This paper sets out a framework for considering the design of regulation of mobile banking. Since it lies at the interface between financial services and telecoms, mobile banking also raises competition policy and interoperability issues that are discussed in the paper. Finally, by unbundling payments services into its component parts, mobile banking provides important lessons for the design of financial regulation more generally in developed as well as developing economies. –

Keywords: Banking,Regulation,Microfinance,Payments System,Mobile Money

JEL: G21

Through the case study of M-PESA in Kenya, Klein and Mayer argue that a “revolution” in payment systems is taking place. It is emerging amongst poor people in less industrialized nations rather than the well-off and technologically savvy in the US-Europe-Japan triangle. And, they conclude, it illustrates how banks need not be the sole administrators of payment systems, that there is yet another process of bank disintermediation in the make.

The M-PESA case resembles that of the Octopus card in Hong Kong, where the transport authority has been the main driver and today about 40% of its use relates to micro-payments other than transport. Banks were not interested in helping develop it and today they have been either marginalized or had to respond offering hybrids (that is, cards with dual VISA/Mastercard chips and Octopus). While Turkey offers an example where only a combination of banks and telecoms results in the right mix of capabilities to bring about change. There telecom operators (Turkcell), banks, authorities and a private e-identity service-providing company (E-Güven) have agreed upon a common SIM-based identification solution. As a result, Turkish customers can use their mobile phone for secure connections to online banking, government services etc.

I take it that there is a case of path dependence in industrialized nations for banks to be the most successful creators of means of payment. Early forms of fiat money and London coffee houses are two examples that readily come to mind. Therefore, an non-industrialized nation is closer to the “natural state” and alternative forms are easier to flourish, particularly if, as in the case above, deploying say a large network of cash machines involved a substantial investment (with the price tag of each individual device requiring some three to ten thousand dollars). Mobile phones offer a cost effective alternative, among other things because they are a platform that already has a large number of users.

But however much retail payments and consumer credit are “hot topics” (see call below), we know very little about financial transitions. I can be wrong in this comparison but I think of co-existing payment systems just like there are co-existing alternative energy supplies. According to Roger Fouquet’s studies in energy transitions (see http://ideas.repec.org/p/bcc/wpaper/2010-05.html), it takes at least 50 years to move form one source of energy to the other. So I am not totally clear how cases in Kenya, Hong Kong or Turkey are the dawn of a new era. The same reasons that have made them successful could bring about their failure in other geographies. Klein and Mayer admit that it is too early to tell whether most experiments in mobile payments will be financially successful. But to the best of my knowledge, we know little on transitions in financial payment systems. An area where it seems we banking historians could make an important contribution.

PS A conference on the economics of retail payments and consumer credit has been organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in September 2011 (see http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/events/2011/consumer-credit-and-payments/)

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:32302&r=his

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres. Economic growth between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ, and it alone explains 20% of the variation in GDP growth. With due reservations it is also found to be more important determinant of GDP growth than country’s political regime type. Controlling for male organ slows convergence and mitigates the negative effect of population growth on economic development slightly. Although all evidence is suggestive at this stage, the `male organ hypothesis’ put forward here is robust to exhaustive set of controls and rests on surprisingly strong correlations.
Keywords: Economic growth; development; male organ; penile length; Solow model
JEL: O47

Although it compares economic development in 1960 vs 1985, this is not strictly a historical piece. Hence why it was placed at the bottom of the report. However, it is included in the report and blog as it follows from the previous discussion on the blog relating to internal vs external consistency. The article has also attracted attention in the popular press:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/tag/tatu-westling

http://www.interest.co.nz/category/people/tatu-westling

Westling argues, I think correctly, that physical features can be an interesting measure of development of non-oil producing countries. His choice of the male organ is justified as: “it represents a well defined and concrete object. Second, it is relatively easy to measure (erect length is used). Third, it is largely free from cultural connotations that might hound complex institutional variables..’. I can see that economic development can associate, enhance or even feedback with changes in physical features. For instance, height. But I find the inverse causation hard to follow. I think this is a case of good correlation but very doubtful causality. Westling readily acknowledges that much: “the exact channel through which these penile-effects take place remains unclear.”

http://www.business.ualberta.ca/RandallMorck/Research/~/media/University%20of%20Alberta/Faculties/Business/FacultyAndStaff/FSA/RandallMorck/Documents/Research/PublicationsLanguages/EconomicsHistoryandCausationNBERw16678.pdf

Economics and history both strive to understand causation: economics using instrumental variables econometrics and history by weighing the plausibility of alternative narratives. Instrumental variables can lose value with repeated use because of an econometric tragedy of the commons bias: each successful use of an instrument potentially creates an additional latent variable bias problem for all other uses of that instrument – past and future. Economists should therefore consider historians’ approach to inferring causality from detailed context, the plausibility of alternative narratives, external consistency, and recognition that free will makes human decisions intrinsically exogenous.

This paper has yet to appear in NEP-HIS but should be forthcoming as the NBER takes a bit to update its series. The paper has already been published (Business History Review, 85(1), Spring 2011).

Morck and Yeung offer a long and detailed critique of mainstream economics through its excessive use of econometrics and disregard for  work by other economists. This article touches on an interesting idea, namely the need for greater external consistency in quantitative studies.

I was hoping that along side this critique the authors would have offered something similar for historians, perhaps along the lines of what Friedman and Jones state in the introduction to that same issue of BHR. I also felt their overall argument would have been more powerful if the paper had been published in a high ranking, mainstream outlet,  the Journal of Economic History  or any other of the highly quantitative outlets in the area.

This working paper offers a longitudinal and descriptive analysis of the strategies of multinationals from developed countries in developing countries. The central argument is that strategies were shaped by the trade-off between opportunity and risk. Three broad environmental factors determined the trade-off. The first was the prevailing political economy, including the policies of both host and home governments, and the international legal framework. The second was the market and resources of the host country. The third factor was competition from local firms. The impact of these factors on corporate strategies is explored, as shown in Fig. 1, during the three eras in the modern history of globalization from the nineteenth century until the present day. The performance of specific multinationals depended on the extent to which their internal capabilities enabled them to respond to these external opportunities and threats.

International Business and the study of Multinational Corporations is perceived as one of the areas where business historians have made significant contributions. Indeed, the late John Dunning, one of the major contributors to the area, was supportive of using longitudinal and multi-sourced approach to better understand the motivations to pursue foreign owned, value adding activities by firms (or groups of firms). Geoff Jones has also made important contributions to the area as well as documenting the role of entrepreneurs in Latin America. This piece is interesting and welcomed as a way to bring both strands together, although more could be done to portray the issue from the view point of host economies.

David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the world, we extended and broadened the concept into a management tool for describing, communicating and implementing strategy. This paper describes the roots and motivation for the original Balanced Scorecard article as well as the subsequent innovations that connected it to a larger management literature.

It seems an important number of key academics whose ideas helped to shape business and management thought at the end of the 20th century are coming close to retirement age. ”Luminaries” such as Russell Ackoff, Peter Drucker and Alfred Chandler were productive very much until they passed away. We celebrated their life through special editions and “life’s work” edited books. But as the above paper suggests, it seem some are happy to comment on their own work (see also a auto-bio from Eugene Fama at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1553244). This self assessment is interesting as there is really no tradition in mainstream studies in business and management, to devote a space for reflection on the different aspects of evolution of business, business practice, management and management thought.  This is surprising given that for some authoritative sources, more history in the teaching of business and management is the way forward (see http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14493183).