This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized “all-Russian” Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank’s practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.

In the early twentieth century, the Malayan pineapple was the cheapest but most consumed canned fruit in Britain, most of which was produced by local Chinese enterprises in British Malaya. Current historiography of the Malayan pineapple industry has highlighted its lack of automation and branding that made the canned pineapples low quality and therefore cheap; a consequence of colonial commodity production framework that prioritized rubber exports. A key assumption is that Britain’s high demand for Malayan pineapples was mainly driven by the harsh economic conditions during the Depression years. However, using previously unexamined colonial newspaper reports and archival sources on the Empire Marketing Board, this study sheds light on how two representatives of the pineapple industry—Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian—actively leveraged colonial ties and production cheapness to corner imperial markets. This study’s contribution is two-fold. First, it expands the Malayan pineapple industry’s current historiography by situating it within the broader debates on imperial marketing, commodity chains, and local entrepreneurship. By focusing on the marketing strategies which Chinese entrepreneurs devised within a colonial framework, it adds nuance to the literature on local entrepreneurship and the trajectories of a secondary commodity sector in British colonies. Second, it challenges the predominantly ethnically essentialist readings of Chinese business strategies under colonialism of Southeast Asia, by demonstrating how intra-ethnic cooperation was not always effective in business modernization. In this case, leveraging colonial and imperial ties to navigate colonial logic in commodity trade and production was more useful, even though its success was transient.

Used farm machinery values play a critical role in farm management and in assessing the financial health of the agricultural sector. However, the heterogeneity of machines, particularly regarding embedded technology and usage, complicates efforts to isolate the factors that influence prices. This study leverages a detailed dataset from Tractor Zoom to estimate the effects of machine characteristics and market conditions on auction prices of used 300 to 450 horsepower tractors. We find a nonlinear relationship between machine usage and price: tractors with fewer than 500 hours of use lose approximately $118 per additional hour, while tractors with more than 10,000 hours show only a weakly significant decline of about $2 per hour. We also document pronounced seasonal patterns, with lower prices during the Midwest crop-growing season. These findings provide new evidence on machinery valuation and offer updated insights to inform farmers’ machinery replacement decisions.

This article examines the rise of craft brewing in Canada as a window onto a broader transformation in the cultural logic of post-Fordist capitalism. It argues that craft did not reject markets but reorganized the criteria by which markets conferred worth. In an industry marked by intense postwar consolidation, sensory standardization, and national branding, value had long been anchored in scale, efficiency, and managerial coordination. Craft brewers disrupted this settlement by reattaching moral and aesthetic significance to locality, visible labor, and artisanal care, transforming authenticity into a competitive resource.

Drawing on corporate memoranda, advertising debates, liquor-board files, and acquisition records, the article treats legitimacy as a historically recoverable form of symbolic capital—produced through processes of authentication and convertible into market power. It traces a sequence of conversions: consolidation generated efficiency but justificatory fragility; craft entrepreneurs reorganized evaluation around proximity and provenance; incumbents responded through mimicry, acquisition, and portfolio governance. As authenticity became legible and economically valuable, it became portable and vulnerable to “inauthenticity discounts” when ownership disrupted recognition.

The Canadian case demonstrates how markets metabolize critique by converting dissent into governable value, and it invites business historians to treat legitimacy not as reputational residue but as infrastructure within modern enterprise strategy.

This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.

We examine corporate ownership and control using a sample of 90 Australian companies in the 1930s. The interwar period was formative in Australia for the growth of corporations and share ownership, although investor protections and information lagged. We estimate the ownership share of the Board, separately the CEO/Chairman, and other significant blockholders. Our sources enable us to account for shares controlled indirectly through family ownership and related entities. This matters to our results, especially in identifying family firms. Board ownership was similar to the US and UK in the early twentieth century; but taking account of shares controlled through related entities changes the story to an insider system where ownership and control had not separated. Dual CEOs mattered and blockholders beyond the Board. The drivers of these patterns of ownership and control included the role of family firms, firm age and size, and the types of shares.

Recent crises have increased price volatility, yet farmers’ adoption of forward contracts, futures, options, and price insurance remains low. Since this appears puzzling from a standard expected utility maximizing perspective, we systematically review the literature on the relation between behavioral factors and price hedging. We distinguish behavioral preferences, formally integrated into choice models, from psychological factors, lacking mathematical formalization. Most of the 101 reviewed studies focus on futures and rely on risk aversion assuming expected utility maximization, with limited evidence on behavioral economic drivers. Considering nonclassical preferences and psychological factors in choice models might better capture farmers’ risk management decisions.

Cost-of-capital valuation is a well-established approach to the valuation of liabilities and is one of the cornerstones of current regulatory frameworks for the insurance industry. Standard cost-of-capital considerations typically rely on the assumption that the required buffer capital is held in risk-less one-year bonds. The aim of this work is to analyze the effects of allowing investments of the buffer capital in risky assets, for example, in a combination of stocks and bonds. In particular, we make precise how the decomposition of the buffer capital into contributions from policyholders and investors varies as the degree of riskiness of the investment increases and highlight the role of limited liability in the case of heavy-tailed insurance risks. With a focus on nonlife insurance, we present a combination of general theoretical results, explicit results for certain stochastic models, and numerical results that emphasize the key findings.

The macroeconomic literature assumes that sectoral labor income shares and output per person are uncorrelated across countries. This paper shows that the data reject this assumption for a large set of countries. The labor shares of the manufacturing and market services sectors systematically increase with output per person relative to those of other sectors, leading to a shift of labor income across sectors with economic development. The empirical evidence suggests that capital deepening and cross-sector differences in the degree of capital-labor substitutability may be important for understanding these patterns. Researchers can directly use the provided dataset of labor shares to calibrate macroeconomic models.

This article examines the role of frequent lenders in the credit market of Lima between 1840 and 1865. Frequent lenders were wealthy individuals, many of them merchants or proprietors. Their credit activity was not concentrated among the richest borrowers in Lima; they also served middle- and low-income individuals. In addition, they diversified risk by lending to borrowers from different sectors. Consistent with the hypothesis that frequent lenders knew borrowers better than occasional lenders, they incurred less regularity in repeated lending.

Low insurance uptake in developing countries poses a strong obstacle to financial resilience and poverty reduction. Although behavioural biases, such as ambiguity aversion, myopia and distrust, are acknowledged as key barriers, their combined effects are not directly observed. Therefore, this study relies on regulatory and administrative proxies linked to these biases. This study goes beyond analysing these proxies separately to explore how they co-occur in shaping insurance outcomes. Using a novel crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) on a sample of 40 developing countries across Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and the Americas, we identify multiple, equifinal configurations of regulatory and institutional conditions associated with higher insurance uptake. Our necessity analysis reveals that transparent pricing is central to regulatory environments associated with insurance uptake. In addition, product suitability and design standards, as well as deposit insurance coverage, are sufficient regulatory requirements when combined. The csQCA results show that no condition works in isolation; outcomes are associated with specific combinations of regulatory and institutional conditions. The findings indicate that interventions should be interpreted as configurational regulatory packages.

Pension fund populations often have mortality experiences that are substantially different from the national benchmark. In a motivating case study of Brazilian corporate pension funds, pensioners are observed to have mortality that is 40–55% below the national average, due to the underlying socioeconomic disparities. Direct analysis of a pension fund population is challenging due to very sparse data, with age-specific annual death counts often in low single digits. We design and study a collection of stochastic subpopulation frameworks that coherently capture and project pensioner mortality rates via deflator factors relative to a reference population. Superseding parametric approaches, we propose Gaussian process (GP)-based models that flexibly estimate age- and/or year-specific deflators. We demonstrate that the GP models achieve better goodness of fit and uncertainty quantification. Our models are illustrated on two Brazilian pension funds in the context of exogenous national mortality tables. The GP models are implemented in R Stan using a fully Bayesian approach and take into account over-dispersion relative to the Poisson likelihood.

This paper extends existing national and regional estimates of Cooprative Extension staffing and funding levels through 2024 and describes changes in Extension program priorities. From a peak of 17,694 professional staff working in Extension nation-wide in 1979, we estimate this declined to 13,188 by 2024. Funding sources for Extension became more diversified over time, relying less on Federal (especially formula) funds and more on State and non-government sources. Program content shifted along with funding sources, with a declining share of Extension resources devoted to agriculture, although with significant differences across States and regions.

El análisis tributario de la España colonial en el XVIII se fundamenta en la investigación de las Cajas Reales. La literatura científica se centra en la recopilación de información de los sumarios de los libros comunes y de caja. Siguiendo la línea de las últimas publicaciones, se identifican deficiencias en dicha información. Utilizando datos inéditos de los restantes libros contables, como los manuales, se completan los cargos para la Caja Real de Santiago (Chile) y se depuran las series publicadas eliminando cantidades recaudadas años anteriores y consideradas cargos del corriente. Los resultados sugieren que las recaudaciones no fueron tan elevadas como se ha asumido tradicionalmente. Se resalta así la importancia de la contabilidad en la reconstrucción de la historia económica colonial.