This issue brings together five articles on the modern petroleum industry. Two cover the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century: Michael Adamson's study of the development by independent oilman Ralph Lloyd of California's coastal oil region; and the study by Lisa Bud-Frierman,...

Social capital is an unspecific resource that can improve the market opportunities of individuals and the chances of survival for organizations. In this historical study it will be shown that social capital was divided up among companies and managers during the early twentieth century very...

The objective of this article is to compare the United States and British systems of business organisation and corporate governance during the last 50 years. Of particular interest is the contrasting relationship between governance systems and the pursuit of diversification and refocusing...

Based on the publicly available information on the data sources and methodology used by the Census Bureau to estimate e-commerce and physical retail sales, and based on detailed e-mail communications with the Census official responsible for the retail trade data, we found, in a version of this...

Voices along the whole of the political spectrum are calling for heightened scrutiny of American information-technology companies, especially the Big Five of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. One of the principal themes of this uprising is that present-day antitrust policy, forged...

This paper reports significant discrepancies in the Census’s methods and reports of online and physical retail sales in the United States. We recommend material changes in how the Census Bureau reports e-commerce and physical sales reported to it. We also recommend that the Census commission...

We examine the role of residential segregation and racial discrimination in determining the entry of movie theaters serving African-American customers in the 1950s. These theaters provided an alternative to the segregated theaters of the Jim Crow era. Consistent with preference externalities in...

The authors discuss entry and exit barriers and their interaction as basic building blocks of a decision making process for evaluating competitive advantage of a business. While the concept of entry barriers is much discussed in the context of high quality businesses, the authors posit that exit...