William Summerhill
University of California, Los Angeles · History
Active 1984–2019
About
William Summerhill studies the economic and political history of Brazil. From 2016 to 2019 he was the Dr. E. Bradford Burns Term Chair in Latin American Studies. Author of Inglorious Revolution (Yale Press, 2015), and Order Against Progress (Stanford Press, 2003). Specializes in economic history, Brazil, historical political economy, sovereign debt, and railroads.
Research topics
- Economics
- Business
- Political science
- Geography
- Financial system
Selected publications
The American Historical Review · 2019-05-30
article1st authorCorrespondingSovereign commitment and financial underdevelopment in nineteenth-century Brazil
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2018-07-24 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFollowing independence, the government of Brazil borrowed repeatedly without default. Not only did it obtain long-term loans in London, it defied “original sin” by borrowing significant amounts from the domestic market. Most of the internal debt was in paper currency without a fixed maturity, and by the 1850s was larger than the external debt. Parliamentary authority over fiscal and debt policy helped to credibly commit the government to repay. Commitment did not, however, lead to a financial revolution. On the contrary, private interest rates remained high even as the government’s cost of borrowing fell. Highly centralized political institutions concentrated authority in the hands of a narrow political elite, which restricted incorporation in general and the creation of banks in particular. The result was successful sovereign borrowing with financial underdevelopment.
The Economic History Review · 2017-07-12
article1st authorCorrespondingChapter Seven: Concentration and Cronyism
Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingYale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-14 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingNineteenth-century Brazil’s constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why sovereign creditworthiness did not necessarily translate into financial development. “Using a vast array of archival evidence, Summerhill convincingly shows that political commitment to a secure public debt was neither necessary nor sufficient to insure financial development in nineteenth-century Brazil. A must-read for economic and financial historians and for anyone interested in the politics of financial development.” —Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, California Institute of Technology
Chapter Two: Sovereign Borrowing and Imperial Debt Policy
Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingChapter Six: Controlling Capital
Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingChapter Three: Tropical Credibility on Lombard Street
Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2016-01-01
articleSenior authormanufactures. The R.G. Dun & Co. Collection is a set of detailed credit reports recorded by a credit rating company, the R.G. Dun & Co. Starting in 1842 agents of the R.G. Dun & Co. gathered information on the firms in their various regions and regularly reported this information to the New York headquarters. The basic content of the record includes the owners of the firm and their status (age, family relation, personal aptitude as an entrepreneur, and wealth), firm performance (sales, profit), financial transaction (mortgages, failure, bankruptcy, etc.), and an evaluation of their creditworthiness. In the 1960s Dun & Bradstreet, the successor of the R.G. Dun & Co., made the firm's records collected from 1842 to 1890 available to the public at the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School. The collection consists of about 2,600 ledgers with 300-400 pages per volume with records on more than a million firms. The manuscript census of manufactures consists of records of firm-level information such as total product, capital, employment, and wages, on which published aggregate information in the census of manufactures was based. By combining the manuscript census of manufactures of 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 with the R.G. Dun & Co. Collection, it is possible to construct a firm-level panel data set covering the 1850 to 1880 period. Due to large size of the two sources, sampling is necessary. I chose two leading industrial areas of the nineteenth century, Bristol and Essex County, Massachusetts, recorded every firm from these regions in the two data sources, and then linked them. Bristol County had three major industrial cities, Fall River, New Bedford, and Attleboro. Fall River and New Bedford had grown up as a center of the textile industry during the nineteenth century, and Attleboro was one of the national centers of the jewelry industry. Essex County was an important producer of textile, boots, and shoes. The boot and shoe industry of Essex County, led by Lynn and Haverhill, produced almost 50 percent of the total national output. These thriving and competitive industrial conditions are suitable for investigating determinants of firm ownership structures and their impact on firm performances. I first explore the dynamics of this firm population by analyzing their exit behavior. Because the R.G. Dun & Co. Collection recorded whether a firm exited by closure, sales, or dissolution, etc, it is possible to comprehensively examine exit patterns and the relation between ownership structure and firm performance. In addition, this analysis can contribute to a better understanding of the business failure problem during the nineteenth century. Business failure was one of the most important social and political issues during the nineteenth century. Business journals frequently dealt with a business failure as their cover story, and the U.S. Congress had repeatedly enacted and repealed national bankruptcy laws until the introduction of a permanent one in 1898.
Sovereign Borrowing and Imperial Debt Policy
Yale University Press eBooks · 2015-10-06
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter presents a model of the political economics of sovereign borrowing. It establishes the conditions under which a ruler will seek to borrow and capitalists will agree to lend, despite having no access to third-party enforcement of the debt contract. The model corresponds to fundamental features of the political institutions that governed fiscal practice in Imperial Brazil. The chapter highlights how particular institutional arrangements permit higher levels of borrowing at lower cost—stylized conditions that correspond remarkably well to the Imperial state's own institutions and to its own experience in the capital markets. The most visible of these institutions was the division of fiscal authority between the executive and the legislative branch defined by the Constitution of 1824. The chapter also establishes the contours of Brazil's public finances from independence in 1822 to the fall of the constitutional monarchy in 1889. It tests the hypothesis that the Empire's fiscal policy had been sustainable.
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Thorsten Beck
- 3 shared
Charles S. Vavrina
University of Florida
- 3 shared
Juan Miguel Crivelli
- 2 shared
Anna J. Schwartz
Yale University
- 2 shared
Daniel M. G. Raff
- 2 shared
Peter Phillips
Ipswich Hospital
- 2 shared
Carole Shammas
University of Southern California
- 2 shared
Kenneth L. Sokoloff
Awards & honors
- Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, Economic History Association
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