Business Accounting
IT, Accounting and Economics
While Stone and colleagues were collating national accounts, extending them across the world, and projecting them into the future, and Feinstein was extending them back into history, another Faculty project was innovating at the micro level. Its members were collating, standardising, and analysing statistically a unique archive of company financial accounts which was eventually to stretch from 1948 to 1990.[1] This began in the early 1960s and built on a National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) project led by Brian Tew and Cambridge’s Ronald Henderson, which was reported in Tew and Henderson (1959). The NIESR and then the Board of Trade had standardised the accounts and committed them to punched cards. The Cambridge project aimed to take advantage of new developments in computing to extend and assemble these accounts in a form which could be analysed electronically to answer questions in economics. Cambridge was peculiarly well equipped to develop such work because of its lead in computing at the time. The hardware and expertise newly available in Cambridge made possible a step change in the volume of data which could be processed: a whole population of UK quoted companies’ financial accounts was for the first time assembled in digital form and analysed econometrically. Geoffrey Whittington, a key figure in this development, recalls joining the lines of famous mathematicians, astronomers, and geologists queuing to use the pioneering Cambridge computers, the series of false starts as different approaches and machines were tried, and the many night shifts required to gain time on the machine. In addition to access to such path-breaking hardware, the Faculty researchers benefited also from outstanding software specialists, especially Harry Burley and Joyce Wheeler.[2] The resulting statistical analyses drew on much more substantial bodies of evidence than could previously have been managed: landmark publications from this work include Singh and Whittington (1968, 1975), Singh (1971), and Whittington (1971, 1972).
- [1] By which time commercial providers offered databases suitable for such work. The 1948-1990 data areavailable from the ESRC Data Archive at Essex University.
- [2] Their contributions were recognised on the title pages of Singh and Whittington (in collaboration withH.T. Burley) (1968) and Meeks et al. (1998).
