Calendrier du 13 juin 2018
Development Economics Seminar
Du 13/06/2018 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
WAHHAJ Zaki (Keynes College, University of Kent)
Marriage, Work and Migration: The Role of Infrastructure Development and Gender Norms
écrit avec Amrit Amirapu (University of Kent) and Niaz Asadullah (University of Malaya)
Traditional gender norms can restrict female independent migration, thus limiting rural women in their ability to take advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. Under such restrictions, marriage can potentially become a means of female long-distance migration and produce interlinkages between marriage and labour markets. To test this hypothesis, we use the event of the construction of a major bridge in Bangladesh – which dramatically reduced travel time between the economically deprived north-western region and the industrial belt located around the capital city Dhaka – as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in migration costs. We find effects of the bridge construction on rural women from north-western Bangladesh, but only for those coming from families above a poverty threshold: they are more likely to migrate towards Dhaka, work in the urban manufacturing sector, and pay a higher dowry. There is a statistically significant effect on marriage-related migration but not on economic migration. We find no effects on women from families below the poverty threshold.
Economic History Seminar
Du 13/06/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
O SULLIVAN Mary (Université de Genève)
No Capitalism Please, We’re Historians: The Elusive Rôle of Profit in the History of Economic Life
If capitalism is to have a distinctive economic meaning, that meaning stems not from the mere existence of capital but from capital’s relationship to profit. That makes the study of the generation and appropriation and erosion of profit of crucial importance to an understanding of capitalism. However, historians of economic life – whether economic historians, the new historians of capitalism or business historians – are remarkably reluctant to grapple with the history of profit. One could illustrate the point using any major controversy in the history of capitalism but I will illustrate historians’ neglect of profits by drawing on the ongoing debate about capitalism and slavery. Then I will turn to an important exception to the rule by focussing on the substantial and heterogeneous literature on the history of accounting. That literature offers valuable guidance on the meaning and measurement of profit over time but that is not the same as a history of profit. Instead what we need are historical studies of the generation, erosion, appropriation and deployment of profits and I will draw on historical research on profit and capital in mercantile history to suggest that such studies can offer promising insights on the historical dynamics of capitalism.