Since 1917, tax filers in the United States who itemize tax deductions have been able to subtract gifts to eligible charities from their taxable income. The deduction is especially valuable to successful entrepreneurs who donate corporate stock. Such philanthropy was seen as a close substitute for government spending until after the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, high tax rates catalyzed the formation of large foundations from industrial fortunes and precipitated a national debate about the legitimacy of such giving. The midcentury debate preceded increased oversight of charities and foundations and a shift in the way U.S. lawmakers regarded the contribution deduction—from a subsidy by philanthropists of public goods government would otherwise provide to an implicit public cost.

In her essay “Anti-Competition Regulation,” Anne Fleming explores the history and political economy of “certificates of public convenience.” For most regulation, repression of competition is an unfortunate side effect—something to be traded off for a safer, healthier, and more equal society. But for certificates of public convenience, repression of competition is itself the goal. Free competition can yield bad results, for consumers or firms (arguments emphasize one or the other depending on the ideology of the time). Certificates cut to the heart of the problem by limiting new entry into a market only when, as one early statute put it, new entry would “promote the convenience and advantage of the community.”

Decarbonization has been identified as necessary to preventing catastrophic climate change, creating a dilemma for the global oil industry. This article examines the industry's reaction to this dilemma and focuses on its historical response to market and governmental regulatory pressure. The article argues that differing national climate policies provoked some oil companies to develop proactive decarbonization strategies. However, the continued growth of fossil fuel demand, the industry's vested interests, and the voluntary nature of climate governance have resulted in the industry taking very little meaningful action to achieve decarbonization.

Like many other American corporations, Intel was outcompeted in manufacturing by Japanese firms in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. By 1985, it became clear that the corporation's weakness in production endangered its long-term survival. Responding to the Japanese challenge, Intel's upper management instigated a fundamental reform of manufacturing. At their behest, production engineers and managers adopted Japanese manufacturing technologies and operating procedures. They put microchip fabrication on a scientific footing. They developed new ways of transferring processes from development to production and standardized the firm's factories. This major transformation enabled Intel to reach manufacturing parity with Japanese chipmakers by the early 1990s.

This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Roadblocks include misaligned incentives, missing institutions, inertia of economic systems, and the concept of sustainability itself. Overcoming these roadblocks will require systematic interventions and alternative normative concepts.

This article examines the politics of airline deregulation in the 1970s, and the events that led to the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It links the antibureaucratic, antiregulatory policies of the 1970s to ideas closely connected to the New Left, the counterculture, and other left-wing subcultures that dominated high and low thought in the 1960s. By linking this source of antibureaucratic sentiment to the politics of airline deregulation, this article suggests a new direction for historians who study the American state in the last decades of the twentieth century. As they focus their attention on the rise of market-based, neoliberal regulatory policies, they should look for their origins not only in the growing strength of the intellectual and political right, but also in the political thought and practice of the 1960s left.

The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.

This research note uses the case of nineteenth-century Chile to argue that the phenomenon of early green entrepreneurship was not confined to the United States and Europe. It focuses on Chile-based inventors who pursued intellectual-property protection in solar, tidal, wave motion, water flow, and wind power. The backgrounds and careers of these inventors are examined. The case contests the popular assumption that knowledge always originated in the developed North and flowed southward. Instead, at least in the case of renewable energy, knowledge emerged endogenously in Chile and sometimes even flowed northward. This research note argues that the circulation of knowledge was strongly linked to the mobility of individuals rather than to the mobility of patents between North and South.

Air travel is unpleasant for many reasons, particularly in the post-9/11 age. Yet, blame for the cramped accommodations, bag fees, and lack of direct flights has to be assigned in part to the deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s. Airline deregulation and its consequences symbolize the ways in which neoliberal ideas and practices have come to shape economic policies as well as the daily lives of ordinary Americans.

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in understanding Indian business history. A number of business history books have been published in the academic and nonacademic press. Special issues on India have appeared in leading field journals, more management schools in India and outside are engaging with the field, internship and fellowship opportunities have been initiated, and business archives have sprung up. This article documents these recent trends, examines the emerging scholarship, and identifies gaps that need to be addressed in the future.

Despite the fact that several Chilean companies have experienced great success in recent decades, becoming some of Latin America's largest international enterprises, the field of business history has lagged behind in Chile relative to other Latin American countries. “There is no tradition of business history in Chile,” the editors of these two volumes acknowledge in their introduction (1:13). This gives their publication greater relevance, since it will certainly foster more interest in the field in Chile, which will enable the field of business history to gain more of a hold in Chile in the near future.

This is an important book. For business historians writing about the late nineteenth century to the present, it offers a kaleidoscope of ways to study the history of the forms and organizational structures of modern big business. Its handle for doing so is the business group. The book is a sequel to Asli Colpan, Takashi Hikino, and James Lincoln's edited, pathbreaking Oxford University Press volume published in 2010 and entitled The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups. The latter opened up new horizons.

The Chicago School of antitrust is often thought to have killed off antitrust enforcement beginning in the late 1970s. In fact, although Chicago school prescriptions were significantly more laissez-faire than the structuralist school Chicago replaced, antitrust enforcement did not die under Chicago's influence. Rather, by directing antitrust to focus on technical economic analysis, Chicago contributed to the creation of a large and entrenched class of antitrust professionals—economists and lawyers—with a vested interest in preserving antitrust as a legal and regulatory enterprise. Today, Chicago School's consumer welfare standard and specific enforcement prescriptions are coming increasingly under political pressure and may be replaced or supplemented in the near term. But Chicago's redirection of antitrust toward technical economic analysis and technocratic reasoning seems likely to remain a durable legacy.

Adam Tooze's Crashed is arguably the first historical narrative of the financial crisis. It is an ambitious account of the crisis and its global economic, financial, political, and geopolitical causes and implications. Crashed is organized chronologically in four parts—the “Gathering Storm,” “The Global Crisis,” “Eurozone,” and “Aftershocks”—and focuses more on the macrolevel structures, processes, and decisions than on the microlevel and the people suffering from the crisis. Except, that is, in aggregate numbers and a few empathic comments such as this: “As house prices fell, equity dwindled, and the hardest hit slid into negative equity. Families scrambled to slash spending and pay down credit card and other short-term debt. The result was a smothering recession in consumer demand” (p. 143).