The literature on the development of American industrial research suggests that during the twentieth century large firms “dominated” industrial research, and reaped the majority of the benefits from such activity. This paper utilizes new data to analyze both the relationship between firm size and research employment and the impact of research activity on firm growth and survival during 1921–1946. The results suggest that large firms were no more research-intensive than were small firms during the 1921–1946 period. Research activity significantly enhanced the probability of firms' survival among the ranks of the 200 largest manufacturing firms during 1921–1946. Research employment also improved the growth performance of both large and small firms during 1933–1946.

In this article, we study the emergence of an extractive institution that hampered economic development in Italy for more than a century: the Sicilian mafia. Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. In this article, we argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for overseas export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry, we show that mafia presence is strongly related to the production of oranges and lemons. The results hold when different data sources and several controls are employed.

The laws and regulations that shaped the structure of the banking industry from the Civil War to the Great Depression were strongly influenced by the banking community. In this period legal constraints on banks were weakened by competition between state and federal regulators trying to increase membership in their banking systems. The elimination of regulation was not completed, however, because the politically most powerful group in the industry, the unit banks, had an interest in preserving some regulations.

The most successful economies of modern, and perhaps earlier, economic history appear to have had “financial revolutions” that created innovative financial systems before they became leading economies. This suggests that good financial systems may have played a causal role in economic modernization. I identify the key institutional components of such financial systems. Using the United States and Japan as examples, I discuss how two financial revolutions occurred. Effective leadership on the part of strong-willed individuals was crucial in each case.

This article examines changes in institutions that protected property rights in the Alps between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century and, in particular, alternative management systems adopted for the common pastures and forests in about 200 communities. Over time, private-order institutions in the form of charters replaced informal arrangements sustained by the long-run interaction among villagers. Although costly to run, the charters accomplished several tasks that increased resource use efficiency.

The late Victorian era was characterized by close links between politicians and firms in the United Kingdom, with up to half of all members of Parliament serving as company directors. We analyze 467 British companies over the period 1895 to 1904. An analysis of election results shows that the election of a new tech director is associated with a 2 percent to 2.5 percent increase in that firm's share price, whereas old tech firms were unaffected by the electoral fortunes of their directors. New technology firms with political directors were more likely to undertake seasoned issues of both equity and debt.

This article discusses the changing living standards among the Korean masses under Japanese rule. Farm income per household, agricultural real wages, and per capita calorie intake from staple foods declined. On the other hand primary school enrollment, literacy, and survival rates rose, and average stature at least did not decrease. Arguing that literacy rates, survival rates, and average stature are variables more directly related to living conditions than the others, this article concludes that the Korean masses' standards of living rose between colonization and 1940. Still, any summary assessment depends on the weights assigned to different variables.

The analysis of fluctuations longer than the nine-year business cycle has been somewhat confused by a failure to distinguish sharply and to relate three distinct phenomena: the forces set in motion by a leading sector in growth, stemming from the introduction and progressive diffusion of a new technology, and its deceleration; the forces set in motion by changes in the profitability of producing foodstuffs and raw materials, whether from the side of prices or technology, including their effects on investment in new territories and mines, on capital movements, interest rates, terms of trade, and domestic and international income distribution; and the forces set in motion (notably, in housing and urban infrastructure) by large waves of international or domestic migration or other forces changing the rate of family formation, housing demand, and the size of the working force. As the world economy unfolded after 1783, these three phenomena operated concurrently and related to each other in complex ways not easy to disentangle. Nevertheless, the substantial literature on long waves can be usefully clarified by distinguishing these phenomena more sharply than is sometimes done and then relating them to each other at particular times and places. The exercise of doing so has, I believe, some general implications for economic theory, for they are all aspects of the process of adjustment towards a moving equilibrium, never attained—a process for which we lack an adequate dynamic theory.

John Stuart Mill's comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.

Spain provides an opportunity to study the causes of regional differences in industrial development over the nineteenth century. As transportation costs decreased and barriers to domestic trade were eliminated, Spanish manufacturing became increasingly concentrated in a few regions. This article combines Heckscher-Ohlin and economic-geography frameworks and finds that comparative-advantage and increasing-return effects were economically very significant and practically explained all differences in industrialization levels across regions. The deficits of some regions in terms of industrialization appear to have been largely attributable to their factor endowments and the absence of home-market effects for modern industries.

The problem of controlling overseas managers confronts all multilocational firms. Historians have argued that because of the extreme time lags in communication, chartered companies were unable to control managerial behavior. We argue that not only did the Hudson’s Bay Company understand the agency problem but also put into operation strategies designed to attenuate opportunistic behavior. The company used employment contracts and control systems and established a social structure compatible with the company’s aims.

Using a new historical data set on the availability of schools, I analyze why there was so little primary education in British India, where as late as 1911 there were fewer than three primary schools for every ten villages. The findings show that greater caste and religious diversity contributed to both low and misguided private spending. Indeed more diverse districts had fewer privately managed primary schools and a smaller ratio of primary to secondary schools. Given primary schools were correlated with subsequent literacy, local factors that disrupted primary school provision had important consequences for India's limited achievement in basic education.

Historical events are reflected in asset prices. We analyze movements in the price of bonds issued by five European governments and traded on the Swiss bourse between 1928 and 1948, with special attention to the war years. Some war events that are generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices. This holds, in particular, for the official outbreak of the war and changes in national sovereignty. But other events to which historians attach great importance are not reflected in bond prices, most prominently Germany's capitulation in 1945.

Some neglected turn-of-the century American economists, who influenced or participated in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, argued that modern capitalism tended toward recurrent crises as a result of oversaving and surplus capital. These economists held that the construction of an international investment system offered a partial solution to the surplus-capital problem. Focusing on China, U.S. foreign policy at the outset of the twentieth century sought to install the gold-exchange standard in monetary relations between industrial and nonindustrial countries as a condition of such an international investment system.

Between 1842 and 1852, eleven states adopted new constitutions, simultaneously creating procedures for issuing government debt and for chartering corporations through general incorporation acts. Why simultaneously? Voters wanted geographically specific infrastructure investments but opposed geographically widespread taxation. States resolved the dilemma by developing several innovative public finance schemes. One, “taxless finance,” used borrowed funds and special corporate privileges without raising current taxes. Another scheme, “benefit taxation,” coordinated the incidence of taxes with the geographic benefits of investments through the property tax. After the fiscal crisis of the early 1840s, states changed their constitutions to eliminate taxless finance in the future.

Fifteen or so years ago and for many decades before that, popularly speaking, it was not uncommon to think of the Japanese as slavish imitators of foreign technology. As research workers in economic history, we recognize that slavish imitation of foreign technology is no easy matter. Foreign technical practice is hardly uniform. Choice among a number of competing technologies is hardly child's play. Young Japanese students of a century ago were enjoined to go overseas, discover what was best and make it Japanese. Such injunctions by a semi-feudal oligarchy and its intellectual supporters while progressive in spirit were naive. One process rarely dominates international industry. What was useful for the world's leader might not be appropriate for the human and nonhuman resource endowment of late nineteenth-century Japan. Initially, Japan's worldwide search led it to adopt a French-style army, an American-style banking system, and a British-style cotton textile industry. In time each of these models were either discarded in favor of other national models or otherwise modified to meet the imperatives of assimilation.

Between 1850 and 2000 Spain's real output and labor productivity grew at average rates of 2.5 and 2.1 percent. The sources of this long-run growth are investigated here for the first time. Broad capital accumulation and efficiency gains appear as complementary in Spain's long-term growth. Factor accumulation dominated long-run growth up to 1950, while total factor productivity (TFP) led thereafter and, especially, during periods of growth acceleration. The main spurts in TFP and capital coincide with the impact of the railroads (1850s-1880), the electrification (the 1920s and 1950s), and to the adoption of new vintage technology during the Golden Age.

In contrast to historical accounts of the boom and crash of the 1929 stock market, recent econometric studies have concluded that there were no bubbles in the American stock market over the past one hundred years. Examining the pricing of loans to stock brokers, we find information on the lenders' perceptions of the future course of stock prices in 1929. From this market, we extract an estimate of the bubble in stock prices. This bubble component contributes significantly to explain stock price behavior, even though standard cointegration tests suggest that there was no bubble in the market.

When we ask ourselves the question why India failed to industrialize (and develop a capitalistic economy) either before or after the British conquest, we touch the core of an old and hallowed controversy in which the partisans and opponents of British imperiahsm once confronted each other. To admirers of British rule, generally, it seemed that the fault lay with certain inherent weaknesses in Indian society. The influence of an “enervating climate,” the heritage of “oriental despotism” and recurring cycles of anarchy (inhibiting the accumulation and investment of capital), primitive techniques and ignorance, the rigidities of the caste system, the prevailing spirit of resignation rather than enterprise, all created conditions in which nothing but a subsistence economy could function. From such wretched beginnings, the British could not, whatever they did, lift Indian economy to European levels. The critics of imperialism saw things in a different light. They insisted that the primitive nature of Indian economy before British conquests ought not to be overstressed, and they ascribed India's backwardness chiefly to the strangulating effects of British rule, to “the drain of wealth,” the destruction of handicrafts, heavy taxation, and discrimination against Indian industry and capital. It will thus be seen that though the controversy involved a number of important aspects of modern Indian economic history, in part at least it centered on the potentialities of development in the Indian economy prior to the British conquests.

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as in the Yangzi delta. Agricultural productivity there was at about the same level as in the Netherlands (and England), but large productivity gaps existed in industry and services. We attempt to explain this concluding that differences in factor costs are probably behind disparities in labor productivity.