The author of this paper intends to compare two industrial territories from western France: Chateau-Renault and Surgères. Chateau-Renault is a tanning center, and the city of Surgères houses a vast dairy. The industries of both areas deal with products of animal origins deriving from...

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end...

Artisans are usually considered as businessmen who don't advertise. The way the dvertising business organized itself at the beginning of the 20th century seems to relegate them out of his field. However, craftsmen do seem to use some kind of commercial communication. To exist in their territory,...

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the Second industrial revolution and the end of the XX century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an...

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli,...

The economic performance of a country depends, among other things, on the strategies and structures of its firms. In the framework that is designed by institutions and policies and determined by technology and macroeconomic cycles, entrepreneurs decide how to allocate available resources in...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

The 'sub-agentschap' of de Nederlandsche Bank did not figurate in the Bank Act 1863, but turned out to develop as a steppingstone between a correspondent and an agency of the Bank. This article considers the history of the office at Leyden, where between 1865 and 1969 a whole lifecycle of a...

This paper studies the origins of trademark registration in Spain and offers, for the first time, data across sectors and regions with a long-term perspective. In apparent contradiction to the slow path of industrialization and the economic backwardness of Spain between 1850 and the 1940s,...

En las páginas que siguen se estudia, siguiendo las vicisitudes biográficas de un ingeniero militar madrileño y más tarde director de empresas, la formación de un grupo empresarial que se ocupó de la promoción industrial y de la gestión de servicios públicos en las provincias de Granada...