This article investigates the development of the Spanish–Italian mercury cartel from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. Previous literature has singled out the cartel as one of the most robust international cartels of the twentieth century, but as this article shows, the cartel broke down toward the end of the 1940s, and although briefly reestablished in 1954, it quickly dissolved again. Building on access to original source material from archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, and United Kingdom, we investigate the underlying reasons why the cartel broke down, and how and why it was eventually reestablished. Because both the main Italian and the Spanish mercury producers were state-owned, this article pays special attention to the influence of the political relations between Spain and Italy on the development of the cartel. The study of the mercury cartel is used as a prism to investigate the point where industry strategies meet government strategies. This article thus contributes to two major strands of literature, both to the business history literature on international cartels in the post-1945 world and to the diplomatic history literature on the intricate relationship between Spain and Italy in the early phase of the Cold War.

While studies show a consistent negative relationship between the level of corruption and range indicators of national-level economic performance, including sovereign credit ratings, we know less about the relationship between corruption and subnational credit ratings. This study suggests that federal transfers allow states with higher levels of corruption to retain good credit ratings, despite the negative economic implications of corruption more broadly, which also allows them to continue to borrow at low costs. Using data on corruption conviction in US states and credit ratings between 2001 and 2015, we show that corruption does not directly reduce credit ratings on average. We find, however, heterogeneous effects, in that there is a negative effect of corruption on credit ratings only in states that have a comparatively low level of fiscal dependence on federal transfers. This suggest that while less dependent states are punished by international assessors when seen as more corrupt, corruption does not affect the ratings of states with higher levels of fiscal dependence on federal revenue.

This article asks how costly targeted trade sanctions imposed by the US government are for domestic firms. I argue that, as a result of sanctions, the firm value of US companies that have supply relationships with sanctioned entities is likely to suffer from lost revenue, reputational damage, and business model uncertainty. I test this expectation by applying an event study to the important case of targeted trade sanctions against Chinese technology companies. I find that sanctions against these companies reduced their US suppliers’ risk-adjusted stock returns by 220 basis points. Firm-level cross-sectional analysis shows that businesses with stronger ties to the sanctioned entities are more negatively affected, which supports the direct connection between sanctions and relevant suppliers. Measuring the domestic economic ramifications of sanctions for the sender country has been elusive. These findings, which are statistically and economically significant, indicate that US companies face notable costs from sanctions against internationally active firms.

This book is a worthy successor to those commissioned by the Bank of England that cover its history from its foundation in 1694. It is written by an expert, is thoroughly researched, and provides a wealth of evidence to support the judicious conclusions that are drawn. The discussion ranges from the highly technical to the narrative, indicating the command that Harold James has over his subject. For the period it covers it will become the authorized version of what the Bank of England did and why, covering the details of how it operated as a complex organization and the decisions it made that affected both the domestic and international financial systems. What emerges is how difficult decision making was after the 1970s, following the breakdown of the postwar certainties of the 1950s and 1960s. Though the title suggests that the coverage of the book extends to 2003, it largely ends in 1997. The years that followed are treated with much less depth. That is understandable, as the elephant in the room for any recent history of the Bank of England is the banking crisis of 2007–2008. As it is, the dates chosen are those between which Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England between 1993 and 2003, exerted his greatest influence, having joined in 1962. Increasingly after 1997 Mervyn King took a leading role, becoming deputy governor in 1998 and then governor in 2003. We will have to wait for another commissioned history to discover what part the Bank of England played in the first major banking crisis to hit Britain since that of Overend and Gurney in 1866. Judging from a comment made in this book (p. 432) it is possible that a full understanding of those years will never emerge. When the Monetary Policy Committee, located in the Bank of England, was set up in 1997 it was agreed that the meetings would be recorded and a full transcript of the discussion made. Subsequently, it was decided to delete the recording and destroy the transcript, leaving only the published official record of what took place. This mirrors the Bank of England's destruction of the papers relating to its role in the secondary banking crisis of 1974.

This article examines how the film industry influenced prevailing gender and skin color stereotypes in India during the first four decades after Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India, shared Hollywood's privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. The influence of film content was especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. As conventional archival sources for this history are lacking, the article employs new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors.