America?s lead over Europe in manufacturing productivity from the late nineteenth century onwards has often been contributed to differences in initial conditions, trapping Europe in a relatively declining, labor-intensive and low-productive technological path. In this paper, I reassess the...

This paper offers a direct industry-of-origin benchmark for the United States and the United Kingdom around 1910. The industry-of-origin approach allows for a disaggregation of international productivity differentials at the industry level, which enhances a deeper understanding of the...

This paper identifies four basic economic characteristics underlying the evolution of the motion picture industry. First, the importance of endogenous sunk costs led to a quality race in the 1910s that left European companies behind. Second, the fact that marginal revenues equalled marginal...

In the 1900s, the European film industry exported throughout the world, at times supplying half the US market. By 1920, however, European films had virtually disappeared from America, and had become marginal in Europe. Theory on sunk costs and market structure suggests that an escalation of sunk...

This paper discusses the problem, implied by Arrow’s fundamental paradox of information, of how to make money from news. To earn money from important news, news traders need to tell the potential buyer what it is, yet once they have revealed it, the buyer no longer needs to pay. This paper...