Market Efficiency and the Close-End Fund Puzzle The ability of market prices to reflect all available, relevant information, is a core element of conventional financial theory (Fama, 1970). The main insight is that the market does a fairly good job in disseminating available information. This allows, in its turn, investors to estimate the ‘fundamental’ ability ..read more

Designed by James Hargreaves, the spinning jenny was one of the crucial inventions in the textile industry during the Industrial Revolution. It decreased production costs, encouraged the movement of textile production into factories ..read more

Though several events are responsible for the advancement of the Industrial Revolution, the one innovation that sits at the helm of the discussion is the steam engine ..read more

On 15 August, 1971, President Richard Nixon shocked the world by ending the Bretton Woods international monetary system the United States had created in 1944.  The system had been under pressure almost from its outset, as US balance of payments deficits eroded the US gold reserve.  As speculative pressure mounted during the summer of 1971, Nixon ..read more

The 1970s and 1980s marked a disaster for the U.S. labor movement. Gone was nearly one out of three members in the private sector, once the heart of organized labor. Today unions represent six percent of corporate employees, the same as in 1929. Facing slow extinction, leaders of the several large unions and their federations ..read more

The American Fur Company was established by John Jacob Astor in New York State, on April 6, 1808. He began tanning furs locally, and built a growing, lucrative trade with private trappers and Native Americans from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas ..read more

President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) heralded entrepreneurs as capitalist heroes, yet for the most part the policies his administration promoted did not help real-life entrepreneurs, including both small business owners in traditional sectors and venture founders in high technology.  The Reagan administration officials’ neoliberal ideology impaired their ability to promote entrepreneurship because they viewed support for ..read more

The Industrial Revolution – which here will mean the mechanization of textile production in Britain between the 1760s and the 1840s – is too often packaged and served as a kind of a technological myth in global economic history. Whether valorized as a tale of innovation and economic growth or condemned as an instrument of ..read more

Q&A with R. Bin Wong on his new article, “Modern Capitalism’s Multiple Pasts and Its Possible Future: The Rise of China, Climate Change, and Economic Transformation,” which was just published in the new issue of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics. The article will be available for free online for the next two weeks ..read more

How was the Chinese and the Polish economic miracle possible? And what these two seemingly unrelated economies have in common ..read more