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Since the early days of Cliometrics (the application of economic theory and quantitative methods to the study of economic history) in the 1960s, Jeffrey Williamson has been one of its most active contributors and his output shows no immediate signs of letting up. Furthermore, he has continued throughout to employ the basic cliometric tools of applied economic theory and quantitative analysis. In contrast, Douglass North and Robert Fogel, recognized with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for their contributions in founding the field of cliometrics, have gone subsequently in more interdisciplinary directions. North has increasingly emphasized the importance of institutions and cultural norms while also incorporating perspectives from cognitive science. Fogel has increasingly incorporated biological approaches in his work and indeed by his own admission has left the field of economic history for an interest in health economics and a field he terms bio-demography. Throughout his career, Williamson has had numerous students and collaborators of considerable distinction in their own right. And this festschrift in his honor incorporates the work of several generations of cliometricians and can thus be regarded as providing an overview of developments in cliometrics over the past 40 years as well as the current state of play in the field.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Ottoman Empire’s net interest payments and foreign debt were sustainable or not in terms of their burden on budget revenues, using the method of historical econometric analysis.

In this study, the period between 1847 and 1882 of the Ottoman Empire is analyzed for sustainability analysis. Within the framework of the study, unit root tests and econometric analysis methods frequently used in the literature were used to analyze the sustainability of public debt. In the econometric analysis, in addition to various unit root tests, current econometric analysis methods, in particular Fourier expansion, were also used.

The results of econometric analyses showed that the burden of interest payments and foreign debt on the budget of the Ottoman state was unsustainable. This situation clearly shows the reason for the official bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, which was declared in 1875.

Although this study reveals the bankruptcy process of an important structure such as the Ottoman Empire in the historical process through econometric analyses, it also gives a very important message to today’s states. Accordingly, today’s state policies and decision-making mechanisms should take these results into account and strive to make the burden of public interest payments sustainable. It is believed that the study will shed light on the public finance policies of today’s states by drawing lessons from the collapse process of the Ottoman state.

Unlike the historical assessments in the literature on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this study presents a cliometric approach by applying current econometric analysis techniques to past historical data. The study explains the unsustainability of the Ottoman Empire’s interest payments and external debt burden in the period under consideration in a way that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been done before.

One of the crucial questions confronting strategy and entrepreneurship scholars continues to be: where do new industry sectors come from? Extant literature suffers from a supply-side “skew” that focuses unduly on the role of heroic figures and celebrity CEOs, at the expense of demand-side considerations. In response, the purpose of this paper is to examine societal demand for entrepreneurial innovations. Employing historical data spanning nearly a century, the author assess more completely the role of latent demand-side signaling in driving the quantity and diversity of entrepreneurial innovation.

Applying the methods of historical econometrics, this study employs historical artifacts and cliometric models to analyze textual data in drawn from three distinctive sources: Popular Science Monthly magazine, from its founding in 1872 to 1969; periodicals, newsletters, club minutes, films and radio transcripts from the Science Society, from 1921 to 1969; and programs and news accounts from the US National High School Science Fair, from 1950 to 1969. In total, 2,084 documents containing 33,720 articles and advertisements were coded for content related to pure science, applied science and commercialized science.

Three key findings are revealed: vast opportunity spaces often exist prior to being occupied by individuals and firms; societal preferences play a vital role in determining the quantity and diversity of entrepreneurial activity; and entrepreneurs who are responsive to latent demand-side signals are likely to experience greater commercial success.

This study intentionally draws data from three markedly different textual sources. The painstaking process of triangulation reveals heretofore unobserved latencies that invite fresh perspectives on innovation discovery and diffusion.

This paper constitutes the most panoramic investigation to-date of the influence wielded by latent demand-side forces in the discovery and commercialization of innovation.

Investigates the importance of English language sources of Friedrich Theodor Althoff (1839‐1908), a German of great influence both in his own country and, indirectly, in the United States. Explores some measures of his influence in education and international understanding. Examines a wide variety of sources. Explains how it could happen that an influential person would end up in intellectual history with almost no recognition. Challenges several conventional assessments. Althoff′s most important contributions are in print and more almost certainly exist in university archives, but the material is scattered and unorganized. Because we do not yet have the full story of this remarkable and complex man, firm conclusions about his influence are not yet possible.

In this chapter, network analysis has been used to map out disciplinary areas of research and authorship in economic history. A total of 5,330 peer-reviewed articles published in the leading economic history journals has been surveyed. Since 1980, the number of publications has risen and then rapidly accelerated over the last 2 decades. This rise has been fueled by research being conducted within European universities instead of US or UK ones.

Long-run changes in living standards occupy an important place in development and growth economics, as well as in economic history. An extensive literature uses heights to study historical living standards. Most historical heights data, however, come from selected subpopulations such as volunteer soldiers, raising concerns about the role of selection bias in these results. Variations in sample mean heights can reflect selection rather than changes in population heights. A Roy-style model of the decision to join the military formalizes the selection problem. Simulations show that even modest differential rewards to the civilian sector produce a military heights sample that is significantly shorter than the cohort from which it is drawn. Monte Carlos show that diagnostics based on departure from the normal distribution have little power to detect selection. To detect height-related selection, we develop a simple, robust diagnostic based on differential selection by age at recruitment. A companion paper (H. Bodenhorn, T. Guinnane, and T. Mroz, 2017) uses this diagnostic to show that the selection problems affect important results in the historical heights literature.

Accounting history has a long tradition, but in recent years it has expanded its interests and approaches. Early literature of accounting history that sought to glorify the practice of accounting and the status of accountants has been supplemented first by a more utilitarian approach viewing the past as a “database” for enhancing understanding of contemporary practice and for identifying past accounting solutions that might be relevant to current problems, and then by a more critical approach, which seeks to understand accounting’s past through the perspective of a range of social and political theories. A tension has developed between those historians whose first loyalty is to the archive and those who look primarily to theory to inform their historical investigations. As accounting history matures, open debate between practitioners of different modes of history making can only be beneficial, not only to the development of the discipline, but also towards our own self‐understandings as accountants, including the impact we have on organizational and social functioning. Suggests that accounting history without a firm archival base is likely to lose direction, but that our notion of what constitutes the archive, and our ways of communicating, explicating and interpreting the archive, should not be taken as fixed. To illustrate this, examines a number of approaches to the writing of accounting history where recent research has begun to demonstrate a critical and interpretive tendency, and suggests directions in which this research might develop as accounting and its history enters the twenty‐first century.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, British public debt, accumulated over the eighteenth century and during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), had attained extremely high levels, at times even reaching 200% of the gross national product (GNP). This increase in debt paradoxically coexisted with the early progression of the industrial revolution.

In this chapter, we explain this concomitance by the effective policies of sovereign debt management put in place by the State and the Bank of England (BoE). First, the State put in place measures to lower its risk of default by funding its debt with tax revenue that would allow it to honour due payments. Second, following the suspension in 1797 of cash payments for pounds sterling, the BoE, in addition to its role in financing the State, followed an active policy of sovereign debt management, promoting both bank liquidity and market liquidity.