We examine the current state of the U.S. public corporation and how it has evolved over the last 40 years. After falling by 50 percent since its peak in 1997, the number of public corporations is now smaller than 40 years ago. These corporations are now much larger and over the last twenty years...

Are the U.S. textile and apparel industries examples of creative destruction or are they just plain destructing? We investigate this question using both aggregate industry-level data and plant-level data from the U.S. Census' LRD. We find that while the aggregate-level evidence is consistent...

Written in celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review (February 2011), this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its...

This paper attempts to show the importance of history in influencing the structure of corporate ownership in France. The strong concentration of family ownership in France is traced to historical weaknesses in the money and capital markets that forced families to have recourse to self-financing....

We document a sequence of institutional innovations associated with the corporate form over the course of several centuries in Toulouse. Shareholding companies that began in the 11th century formally incorporated themselves into two large-scale, widely held firms by 1373. In the years that...

We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of...

This paper provides a new heterogeneous firm model for trade where firms differ in their productivity and experience different market demand shocks. The model incorporates variations in trade policy, trade preferences, and the rules of origin needed to obtain them, to reflect real world...

Hirschman's (1970) seminal thesis that enabling worker “voice” prevents exit from the employment relationship has played a foundational role in labor economics. We provide the first experimental test of this hypothesis in a real-world setting via a randomized controlled trial in Indian...

Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with rich survey data on line...

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from...