David Merrett

University of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Management and Marketing

From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the southern hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the north. The selling practices of these big five exporters-Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Uruguay-ranged from auction through hybrid auction-private sale...

The relocation of the wool market from London to the major Australian port cities from the late nineteenth century required the formation of an institution to govern the auction business, namely the wool brokers' association. Regional variations, among Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, occurred in the structure and effectiveness of the institution d...

From the 1890s the sale of Australian wool was organised through a series of regionally based associations of wool selling brokers and wool buyers. They engaged in cartel-type behaviour by price fixing and exclusive dealing. We ask the question whether the wool selling brokers exploited their monopoly power to thefull in setting fees and charges pa...

We re-interpret the drivers of structural change in Australia from Federation to World War II. Manufacturing increased its relative share of output and employment, the farm sector and mining contracted. Conventional wisdom contends these shifts largely resulted from government policy, particularly increases in trade barriers. We contend that the co...

This paper reviews three major episodes in Australian banking history and argues that in banks have often ‘misread’ the deeper issues and needs for the industry, concentrating on operational issues rather than understanding the bigger picture. Banks have, historically, not appreciated changing requirements for system stability and industry prudenti...

An expanding economy, new technologies, and changing consumer preferences provided growth opportunities for firms in interwar Australia. This period saw an increase in the number of large-scale firms in mining, manufacturing, and a wide range of service industries. Firms unable to rely solely on retained earnings to fund expansion turned to the dom...

Bob Baxt, the third chairman of the Trade Practices Commission, served for a single three-year term from 1988 to 1991. He followed Bob McComas, who had deliberately adopted a non-litigious approach to preserving the competitive process. Baxt was far more proactive and sought to push the frontiers of investigation and precedent, and perhaps, more si...

Relocation of the selling of Australia's wool clip from London to cities in Australia in the late nineteenth century led to the creation of wool selling industry associations, such as the Melbourne Woolbrokers Association (MWA). Highly successful in fostering competitive collaboration that improved market efficiency, the Association rested on the s...

The 1965 legislation to curb restrictive trade practices has been widely regarded as weak. By contrast, the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) has been considered as providing the platform for a more comprehensive competition policy. This paper argues that the 1965-67 and 1971 Acts were more effective than has been commonly recognised in raising awaren...

Between 1973 and 2002, three of Australia's largest multinational companies exited from postcolonial Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Although neither host government wished the companies to leave, the tensions that arose during the course of decolonization made their departure inevitable. Prior to independence, conflicts between Fijians and Indians and...

Australia has historical time series for a wide range of economic data covering most of the twentieth century. These include statistical information relating to national income, demography, prices, external trade, financial markets, and the government sector. However, we lack a long time series for business profits. We have calculations for some in...

Australia has historical time series for a wide range of economic data. These include statistical information relating to national income, demography, prices, external trade, financial markets, and the government sector covering most of the twentieth century.1 However, we lack a long national time series for business profits. We have calculations f...

As part of a wider research project on the history of competition law and its enforcement in Australia from 1973 to 2003, the authors interviewed the four Chairmen who guided the Trade Practices Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over this period, in order to get their views of their role in its history. Given the unt...

To become more proactive in their acquisition of the archives of Victorian business, the University of Melbourne Archives adapted a methodology pioneered by the Minnesota Historical Society. This enabled them to establish criteria to identify industrial sectors, and target  specific  companies  within  them,  whic...

Never before has a book been published which provides such a comprehensive study of Australian corporate leadership over the past 100 years. The Big End of Town is the first proper national business history of twentieth-century Australia. This book traces the evolution of large business enterprises in Australia, from the giants of the nineteenth ce...

This survey article examines the interaction between the domestic capital markets and capital formation in Australia from the 1890s up to the end of World War II. The disenchantment of the City of London with Australian securities in the 1890s opened a window for the development of domestic capital markets. It was the demands of the government for...

Using internal records of board meetings, this research explores issues relating to the motivation of directors’ action during takeover negotiations. The records relate to a time period when regulation was low and directors had ample opportunity to engage in adverse selection and moral hazard. In such circumstances, it might be supposed that they w...

This survey article continues the author's examination of the interaction between domestic capital markets and capital formation by studying the 45 years after the end of World War II. (Part 1 appeared in AEHR 37 (3) 1997.) The significant rise and the sustained increase in the ratio of gross domestic capital formation to gross domestic product (GD...

This paper seeks to explain the motivation for the growth of regulation of the Australian financial sector and banking in particular. It will be argued that the pace and direction of the growth of the regulatory apparatus from the 1930s until the 1980s was set by concerns of governments about macro–economic issues rather than issues affecting the f...

This article draws on the FDI literature to theorise about the likelihood that firms based in a small, highly protectionist and commodity exporting economy located in the south-west Pacific might become multinationals before 1970. It is argued that the scale, structure and geographic isolation of the Australian economy mitigated against large outfl...

Since the 19th century, Australian banking has seen high inward and some outward flows of FDI. However, from the 1980s, Australian banks greatly expanded the scale of their FDI, their geographic scope and the range of products that they offered. This recent outward flow of FDI was the result of a complex and inter-related set of factors, including...

This paper explores a part of the systems used by the British-owned Union Bank of Australia in managing its labour force in the 1920s. The particular concerns addressed here focus on the opportunities presented to workers to 'cheat' arising from the nature of the tasks undertaken, which meant that both output and effort were difficult to observe, a...

This essay explores the development of large scale enterprise in Australia, an economy in which resource industries were unusually important and with a very small domestic market. Using asset size as a yardstick, the authors construct a series of the 100 largest firms operating in the years 1910, 1930, 1952 and 1964. These lists allow the identific...

This essay explores the development of large scale enterprise in Australia, an economy in which resource industries were unusually important and with a very small domestic market. Using asset size as a yardstick, the authors construct a series of the 100 largest firms operating in the years 1910, 1930, 1952 and 1964. These lists allow the identific...

This article uses personnel, payroll, and other records from the Union Bank of Australia to examine internal labor markets. It is shown that employment was characterized by limited ports of entry, impersonal rules for pay and promotion, well-defined career ladders, shielding from the external labor market, and a long-term employment relationship. I...

This paper examines management and HRM practices adopted by Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the transferability of Japanese HRM in the Australian host-country situation. It also compares HRM practices of Japanese MNEs in Australia with the experience in North America and Europe and attempts to map the typology of the human resource ma...

This paper develops an agency-transaction cost model of foreign direct investment (FDI) by Japanese MNEs in Australian manufacturing, financial services and tourism in the 1990s. A survey questionnaire, constructed using the theory, was completed by 69 Japanese MNEs operating in Australia. Based on the questionnaire information, this study uncovers...

This paper argues that the bulk of international funds transfers to and from Australia from the 1830s until the 1960s were handled through correspondent banking relationships rather than internalised by multinational banks. The pervasiveness and longevity of this market-based contractual mode is explained with reference to the theory of transaction...

The paper explores the effects of the reconstruction schemes of the twelve banks of issue which suspended payment in early 1893 on the behaviour of monetary aggregates. Earlier estimates of narrow and broad measures of money seriously underestimate the contraction in the money stock by not netting out all of the significant proportion of deposit li...

Australia's increasing involvement in the international economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century have been explained without regard to the motivation of managers. Micro-economic reform has been credited with increasing the level of competitiveness within the economy. Behaviours within firms, a 'black box', are assumed to have been profi...

Abstract Are large firms more profitable and is their survival rate better than smaller ones? This paper uses Australian time series and cross-sectional data at the firm level for the first half of the twentieth century to address these questions. We compare,the return on equity for the largest 20 companies in a database with the remaining 405 firm...