Longstanding debates about the role of the university in national culture and the global economy have entered a new phase in the past decade in most industrialized, and several industrializing, countries. One important focus of this debate is corporate involvement in academic scientific...

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

This paper argues that the ability to keep innovations secret may be a key determinant of patenting. To test this hypothesis, the paper examines a newly-collected data set of more than 7,000 American and British innovations at four world's fairs between 1851 and 1915. Exhibition data show that...

Today the vast majority of multi-owner firms in the United States are corporations, but that was not the case in the past. Before the advent of the income tax, tort litigation, and significant federal regulation, entrepreneurs more often than not chose to organize as partnerships, a form that...

Few pieces of economic regulation are ubiquitous as usury limits. Similarly, few economic principles are as widely accepted as the belief that interference with freely contracted prices leads to market distortions, and many studies of financial markets find that usury limits negatively affect...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. This essay reconstructs that series, links it to its successors, and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis.

Family firms are typically associated with negative characteristics, including lower tendencies towards innovation, a higher risk of failure, and inefficiencies deriving from nepotism among family members, criticisms which are even greater when the company is handed over to a female relative....

This chapter discusses different approaches pursued to explore three broad questions related to technology diffusion: what general patterns characterize the diffusion of technologies, and how have they changed over time; what are the key drivers of technology, and what are the macroeconomic...

Heightened counterparty risk during the recent financial crisis has raised questions about the role clearinghouses play in global financial stability. Empirical identification of the effect of centralized clearing on counterparty risk is challenging because of the co-incidence of macro-economic...