Estimates of the extent of the corporate economy in eightyâ€one countries in 1910, when the number of corporations globally reached about half a million, show that the US and the British Empire alone accounted for threeâ€quarters of these. The aggregate market value of approaching a...

La Porta et al see Anglo-American common law as most favourable to economic development, but in 1899 Japan explicitly preferred the German corporate law tradition. Yet its new Commercial Code omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al see as the jewel in the crown of...

Around 1900, the businesses of developed Europe - transporting freight by a more advantageous mix of ships, trains and horses - encountered logistic barriers to trade lower than the tyranny of distance imposed on the sparsely populated United States. Highly urbanized, economically integrated and...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, US tobacco manufacturers were not forging ahead of their leading European counterparts in technology, productivity or managerial techniques. On some indicators, including per capita cigarette consumption, the USA strikingly lagged much of the rest of...

Zitzewitz's suggestion, in a Journal of Industrial Economics March 2003 article, that Britain's pre-World War One lead over the USA in tobacco manufacturing productivity was due to its more competitive market cannot be sustained. A larger country sample shows a positive relationship between...

Before 1914, London, the financial centre of a country half the USA's size, had a stock exchange that was larger and qualitatively more developed than New York for both domestic and overseas financing needs. J. P. Morgan's higher profits in New York arose partly from conflicted deals that would...

Although early corporate data are sparse, the statistics of individual incorporations by special act in 1790-1860 assembled by Sylla and Wright leave no doubt that new creations of corporations proper in the US rapidly outstripped those in France, Prussia and the UK. However, other limited...

Because ownership was already more divorced from control in the largest stock market of 1911 (London) than in the largest stock market of 1995 (New York), the consequences for the economy, for good or ill, could have been considerable. Using a large sample of quoted companies with capital of...

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial...

In 1900 US business corporations were dominated by plutocratic family owners, while British and French quoted companies more commonly divorced ownership from control. 'Democratic' corporate governance rules explain some of Europe's precocity and London's exceptional listing requirement of large...