Economic Growth and Economic Performance Over The Long Run: Frontier Research in Economic and Social History

When the Queen asked a group of academics "why nobody saw it [the recession] coming?" during a visit to the London School of Economics in November 2008, she echoed the thoughts of many people. Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted that he failed to see it coming, claiming that the global financial crisis was "completely new territory". Economic historians would argue otherwise, pointing to previous recessions linked to crises in the international financial system. Practitioners and academics alike are looking to the past, to episodes such as the Great Depression and the policy experiments that followed, and to long-run trends to see what can be learned that can inform current policy in the areas of fiscal stimulus, banking reform and monetary policy.

The above highlights just one topic for which economic history can be extremely informative and this will be the theme of the first conference to launch our series. The three conferences will address key themes that are relevant to current debates concerning the nature of and optimal response to economic crises, the determinants of inequality, the effect of immigration on society and the nature of economic growth, focussing on the dynamism of cities. These topics lend themselves to participation by researchers from the Bank of England, government departments, various think-tanks and, of course, academia. The conferences will provide an important opportunity for these stakeholders to interact and identify key lessons for current policy and economic theory. These topics also represent the main areas of interest currently among economic historians.

The outputs will include: new research collaborations, which will be showcased on a revamped version of our existing website http://www.keynes.dk/FRESH/ through the foundation of a working paper series. We will include a page with a list of FRESH participants and a page for posting advice for junior researchers concerning the job market, conference announcements and publishing. Also, a vodcast of the keynote addresses and a selection of the other presentations to be made available on our website and at a variety of other economic history sites. These will be of interest to both an academic and general audience, given their topical nature.

The main beneficiaries of this seminar series will be graduate students and early-career researchers working in the fields of economics, economic history and history. These groups of researchers do not usually have access to substantial travel funding and frequently are only able to attend conferences rather than participating fully by presenting their work and entering into discussion. Graduate students especially can gain invaluable experience which will aid them when they enter the job market at a later stage-- presenting and packaging your research is a large part of succeeding on the job market and these are the skills we will emphasise at our conferences.
It is also likely that relationships with non-academic researchers working in government departments or public policy think-tanks will develop from these seminars, as we will circulate the call for papers to these types of organisations as well-- including the Bank of England, RAND Europe and the government departments responsible for trade and development, the Home Office and the Treasury. We will also alert media outlets such as The Economist to our conference series and believe that the keynote addresses in particular will attract special attention.
By providing funding for senior researchers to come and present their work in our conference series, we are also partly compensating them for devoting their time to helping their junior colleagues and envisage that they will also benefit from the connections made and developed at the three conferences. We are bringing experts in each sub-field as keynote speakers which will then attract other UK and EU-based respected researchers and thus foster networking to further develop these themes and advance the frontier of knowledge in these topics.
Please see the Case for Support for a list of potential participants at each conference.
Another main benefit of the conference series is that it will increase the profile of economic history in the UK by attracting researchers from other countries and producing high quality meetings addressing questions of paramount interest to economic historians everywhere.
The planned outputs of the conference series will help to ensure that the above impacts are achieved. The outputs include a revamped website for the FRESH group, which will allow participants to sign up as members of the organisation and to join our group on Facebook, thus facilitating networking beyond that which takes place at the conferences. The website will also provide information and advice regarding the job market and publishing and will list calls for papers from other relevant conferences. A new FRESH working paper series will be created to showcase the research presented at the conferences and to provide an ongoing venue for graduate students to publicise their work in progress. Finally, we plan to videotape the main presentations from each conference and post these online as a public good for all academics and non-academics interested in these lines of research. This will contribute to boosting the profile of our group and of economic history more generally within the UK.