A popular explanation for the supposed ‘delayed industrialisation’ of the nineteenth century French economy has been the inappropriate attitudes and actions of the managerial classes and family firms. To address these claims we model the supply and demand for entrepreneurship and also management success. We analyse a data set of 244 nineteenth century French businessmen, showing that on the demand side textiles offered greater, and iron and steel less, than average opportunities. On the supply side, secondary and university education were negatively associated with starting a successful firm, as was a father already in business. Surprisingly, Protestantism made no difference to the chances of setting up a firm. In the business performance model, the longer the period the businessman was active, the greater the accumulation – not consistent with life-cycle models of saving. Second, those who started their own business, compared with entering an existing firm, left less wealth at death than they could have expected to acquire over a normal lifetime, other things being equal. Unlike formal education, training – mainly apprenticeship – was associated with greater wealth at death. The pace of wealth accumulation suggests a dynamic sector during the Second Empire, at least where larger businesses were concerned.

Although mortality in Britain showed a long term decline from as early as the eighteenth century, it stagnated in the nineteenth century under the pressures of urbanisation and industrialisation. This paper examines the economic factors which lay behind the resumption of the mortality decline in Britain 1870–1914. A framework of analysis is developed which distinguishes factors in the physical environment (like population density) which affected mortality directly, from price and income movements which affected decisions about expenditure on sewers, water supplies, food, medical staff. A regression analysis of mortality in a sample of 36 towns in England and Wales suggests increases in the incomes of households and town council tax revenues were instrumental in the decline of mortality. This allowed extra spending not only on food, as McKeown emphasised, but also on a wide range of health-enhancing goods and services. The major improvement in the physical environment was the housing stock which rose faster than the population whilst its quality and dimensions were increasingly regulated by central and local government.

Free banking in Switzerland lasted from 1826 to 1907. Although the system was reasonably successful, the Swiss experience has been almost entirely neglected in the debate over free banking. In its more advanced state of development, the stability of the Swiss free banking system deteriorated, since (1) all assumptions underlying the so-called law of adverse clearings were more or less violated, and (2) the note-issuing banks were prevented by their non-issuing rivals from increasing their discount rates, even if some of them were faced with heavy losses of specie. In 1907, therefore, free banking had to be abandoned.

Evidence from newly constructed monthly indices of manufacturing production shows that differences between the Scandinavian countries regarding business cycles in the interwar years were closely related to monetary policy decisions. In the 1920s Sweden made an early return to gold, while Denmark and Norway experienced large fluctuations in nominal and real exchange rates before restoring the gold standard at the prewar parity in 1927–28. The differences in monetary policy were mirrored in the business cycle history; Denmark and Norway being alone in having a particularly severe contraction period in the years 1925–27, referred to as the gold-parity depression. The nominal depreciation of the effective exchange rates following the abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931 led to a significant real depreciation in all three countries. Econometric evidence confirms the view that the decision to leave gold was instrumental in dampening the contractionary business cycle impulses from abroad during the years of the Great Depression.

This article describes the contribution of foreign funds to the development of Italian electric power companies and the placing of loans in New York in the late 1920s. The effect of foreign loans on the financing structure of nine important Italian electric power companies in a period in which domestic long term funds were lacking is discussed. The transformation into a holding structure followed a path common to electric producers in many countries; at the same time holding companies' securities proved more marketable in the international market and the process of financing was made easier. The eventual macro effects of foreign loans on the domestic money supply and on the level of the Lira exchange rate are examined and some questions are raised concerning the relationship set up between the State, financial intermediaries and private savers during the Fascist regime.