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Minnie Throop England

Minnie Throop England (1875-1941) was an economist who taught economics as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln form 1906 to 1921. Prior to World War I, England published a substantial body of work, in the field of monetary economics and economic fluctuations, outside stereotypical "women's issues." From 1912 to 1915, she presented her analysis of entrepreneurial promotion of new enterprises as the cause of crises and the business cycle in four major articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy.

Biography

England is a native of Lincoln, Nebraska. She graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, and married a classmate, who became a farmer. In 1906, England received her P.h.D from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. At university, she studied with William George Langworthy Taylor, whose “Kinetic Theory of Economic Crises” in the University of Nebraska University Studies. After England graduated, taught economics as an assistant professor there. Before 1914, England published a substantial body of work regarding the monetary economics and economic fluctuations, and her work on crises and cycles appeared during a remarkable flourishing of research on monetary and cycle theory. Started from the publication of Irving Fisher's Purchasing Power of Money and the first German edition of Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development in 1911, through Ludwig von Mises's Theory of Money and Credit in German in 1912 and Karl Schlesinger's Theorie der Geld- und Kreditwirtschaft, there were lots of papers related to this topic published. England's papers belonged to this wave of the theory, and her work was recognized by several leading participants such as Fisher and Schumpeter. Although England's research output and the publication of the economic articles is parity with the professors in the same department, she was never promoted due to the political atmosphere of the department.

Research

Minnie Throop England's main scholar interest was analysis of entrepreneural promotion of new enterprises as the cause of crises and the business cycle in four major articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy from 1912 to 1915, and in earlier monographs in the University of Nebraska University studies. There was a dissertation of England called “Church Government and Church Control,” which was never be published, and it was unrelated to her later scholarship.

Statistical Inquiry into the Influence of Credit Upon the Level of Price (1907)

The main task for this paper is to determine the relationship between credit and short-time fluctuations between gold and prices.There are three main parts in this paper- the rise of price, the fall of price, an analysis of the movement of commodity prices. This article was reviewed by Irving Fisher in 1908, who hailed it as an 'able little monograph'. Fisher found that the method employed by Miss England is interesting and novel. It consists in noting the years of lowest and highest points for prices, clearings, loans, note circulation, deposits, etc. It is found that beginning with the lowest point of depression following a crisis, clearings which are taken as a good index of the amount of credit used in trans- actions begin to increase before the commodity prices rather than the increase of prices being a cause of the increase in clearings.