News

  • HHB welcomes Michele Boldrin - Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at the Washington University in Saint Louis - as a HHB Fellow.

    His research focuses on the theory and application of Dynamic General Equilibrium models. He has written on economic growth, business cycles, asset pricing, the welfare system, innovation theory and technological progress, search theory, the labor market, intellectual property, fertility, and international trade.
    His last book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, written in cooperation with David K. Levine, was published in 2008. He is currently Research Fellow of CEPR (London) and FEDEA (Madrid), and an economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis and to the Bank of Japan.

  • HHB welcomes Agar Brugiavini - Professor of Economics at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Director of the Collegio Internazionale Ca'Foscari and Dean of the Venice International University (VIU) - as a HHB Fellow.

    Prof. Brugiavini holds a PhD from LSE (1990), with a thesis titled “Longevity Risk and the Life Cycle”. Since then, she has widely investigated the behaviour of individuals and household both in the area of consumption and saving and in the area of labour supply. In particular, she is interested in the effects of pension reforms on household’s saving decisions, in retirement choices and in the insurance aspects of pension arrangements.  More recently she has looked at the relationship between health conditions and economic behaviour. She is currently member of the Core Management Group of the SHARE project, funded by the EU.

  • Prof. Peter Scott (University of Reading), who has just joined the HHB community as a Researcher, and Prof. James T. Walker (University of Reading), co-authors of the article Demonstrating distinction at ‘the lowest edge of the black-coated class’: The family expenditures of Edwardian railway clerks, have provided the HHB Database with their data about British railway clerks.

    Described by Lord Rosebery as ‘men in the lowest edge, of the black-coated class... most to be considered for their narrowness of means’, railway clerks families faced one of the hardest struggles of all white-collar groups to maintain ‘respectable’ standards of housing, dress and other publicly-observable consumption markers. Railway clerks were also the only group of white-collar workers to leave a substantial volume of pre-1914 household budget data, compiled on a uniform basis, in a series of surveys conducted by the Railway Clerks Association (RCA) from 1910–1912. In the article, the authors utilise aggregate data from 611 household budgets for male railway clerks, together with over 200 surviving budget summaries. They are now part of the HHB Database, while supplementary data used in the publication are drawn from a sample of 100 households headed by railway clerks, from the 1911 Census.
    Featured image: Southampton clerical staff at the beginning of the 19th century.

  • HHB welcomes Peter Scott - Professor of International Business History at Henley Business SchoolUniversity of Reading - as a HHB Researcher.

    Prof. Scott's research interests include: the growth of mass consumption, consumer credit and owner-occupation, together with their impacts on household behaviour; the evolution of mass retailing formats in Britain and the United States; the development of consumer goods industries; and path dependence and technological change.

    His monograph Triumph of the South: A Regional Economic History of Britain During the Early Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate) was awarded the Wadsworth Prize for the best monograph in British business history published in 2007. He has also been the President of the Association of Business Historians.

  • A new budgets source is now part of the HHB Database: the first 1882 issue of the Italian newspaper "Il Contadino". Il Contadino ("The Farmer"), founded in Treviso by Giuseppe Benzi (1855-1941) in 1880 and published until 1924, was devoted to the study of agricultural issues. It was an organ of the local Agrarian Committee and was published every two weeks until 1892, when it started being published on a weekly basis.
    The newspaper dealt with issues of general economic interest and published several articles on pellagra, a disease which was endemic among the peasants of northern Italy (Friuli and Veneto in particular, but also Lombardy) due to a diet almost exclusively based on polenta.

    The issue that is now part of the HHBD includes, in addition to short articles about the distribution and the subject of the newspaper, an article about accattonaggio ("panhandling") and a long article of summary and comment on the following tables of 83 agricultural household budgets.

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