This book originated from the idea that performance is what really matters in business and thus in business history. Yet, surprisingly, the analysis of performances has been neglected by economic and business historians. This book is a first attempt to fill this gap and in doing so provides a totally new approach to European business history. Rather than bringing together national studies, it is based on a single database, measuring performance in eight European countries according to identical criteria. The study spans the entire twentieth century, with particular attention to five benchmark moments: the height of the first globalisation on the eve of the First World War; the late 1920s boom preceding the Great Depression; the European reconstruction of the mid-1950s; the end of 'Golden Age' in the early 1970s; and the height of the second globalisation at the turn of the twenty-first century. The analysis is based on a sample of 1,225 companies, belonging to the three major European economies, Britain, France and Germany; two large south European latecomers, Italy and Spain; two smaller north western countries, Belgium and Sweden, and one small Nordic country, Finland. Performance has been measured using two ratios of profitability: return on equity (ROE) and holding return (HR), thus providing a complementary measure of profitability, the former as seen from the firm's perspective, the latter form the investor's perspective. The book's findings, at times surprising, at once confirm and infirm widely held assumptions regarding business performance - regarding strategy and structure, ownership and control, old and new industries, emerging and advanced economies.
Über den Autor Youssef (Hrsg.) Cassis
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Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic History at the European University Institute. His work mainly focuses on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His most recent publications include Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005, (Cambridge University Press, 2006, 2nd revised edition, 2010), Crises and Opportunities: The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford University Press, 2011); and, with Philip L. Cottrell, Private Banking in Europe: Rise, Retreat and Resurgence (Oxford University Press, 2015). He was the cofounder, in 1994, of Financial History Review (Cambridge University Press). He was also a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History and past President (2005-2007) of the European Business History Association. Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800 (Princeton, 2010) and WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them (Oxford, 2013). He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, a research network fellow of CESifo in Munich, and an associate editor for socioeconomics, health policy, and law at the journal Neurosurgery. He has held visiting positions at the US Department of State, Yale University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Guggenheim Foundation. Catherine Schenk FRHS is Professor of International Economic History at the University of Glasgow. She gained her PhD at the London School of Economics and has held academic posts at Royal Holloway, University of London, Victoria University of Wellington and visiting positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as well as the University of Hong Kong. She is Associate Fellow in the international economics department at Chatham House in London. Her research focuses on international monetary and financial relations after 1945 with a particular emphasis on East Asia and the United Kingdom. She is the author of several books including International Economic Relations since 1945 (2011) and The Decline of Sterling: managing the retreat of an international currency (2010).
