Uppsala Workshop in Financial and Business History 2026
The Uppsala Centre for Business History (UCBH) in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) invites you to participate in the third Uppsala Workshop in Financial and Business History. The workshop will take place in Uppsala, Sweden, on the 3rd and 4th of September, 2026.
This is the third and final workshop in a series held at intervals over several years. This third installment of the series will focus on the theme “Corporate Finance and Organization in Transition”. The history of corporate finance and organization has re-emerged as a central concern of business history, as firms across advanced and emerging economies navigate successive waves of industrialization, globalization and de-globalization, financialization, privatization, and re-regulation. A long line of scholarship has traced how the modern corporation acquired its characteristic form, from the separation of ownership and control identified by Berle and Means (1932) and the rise of managerial capitalism charted by Chandler (1977, 1990), to the comparative study of bank-based and market-based systems of industrial finance (Gerschenkron, 1962; Cameron, 1967; Fohlin, 2007). More recent work has pushed these questions in new directions. La Porta, López-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny (1997, 1998) reframed cross-country differences in corporate finance as functions of legal origin; Rajan and Zingales (2003) documented the “great reversals” in financial development over the twentieth century; and Morck (2005) and Franks, Mayer and Rossi (2009) have shown how institutional change shapes both the evolution of ownership and the structure of corporate control.
Yet much of this literature remains concentrated on Anglo-American and large Continental cases, leaving the Nordic, Central and Eastern European, and emerging market experiences comparatively under-studied. Transitions between legal regimes, between bank-based and market-based finance, between private, family, and state ownership, and between national and transnational regulation of capital markets as well as the banking system have received uneven attention across countries, industries, and time periods. Episodes of upheaval such as the interwar crises, the postwar expansion of managerial capitalism, the deregulation and privatization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, and the post-2008 re-regulation offer fertile ground for comparative and single-case historical work (e.g. Calomiris & Haber, 2014; Quinn & Turner, 2020).
We invite researchers who investigate different aspects of the historical interplay between corporate finance, ownership, and organizational change. Papers can be comparative or focus on specific country, industry, or firm-level cases. Our idea is to bring together current historical research on finance, organization, and the firm, and to give researchers and PhD students a chance to have their work in progress discussed in a workshop environment. The organizers will provide two nights of accommodation and meals during the workshop, and there will be no fee for attending. Limited funding to cover travel costs may also be available for outstanding applications, in particular from junior scholars.
If you are interested in participating, please submit a 500-word paper abstract, along with your affiliation and contact details, no later than May 31st. Decisions regarding acceptance will be communicated around the 15th of June, 2026.
Scientific committee: Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Anders Ögren, Marius Liebald (all Uppsala University), and Simon Billinger (Stockholm School of Economics)
Submissions should be uploaded using this upload link. For any remaining questions, please contact the scientific committee via ucbhworkshops@ekhist.uu.se.
