A Comparative History of Commerce and Industry, Volume I offers a subjective review of how the cultural, social and economic institutions of commerce and industry evolved in industrialized nations to produce the institution we now know as business enterprise

We suggest a parsimonious dynamic agency model in which workers have status concerns. A firm is a promotion hierarchy in which a worker's status depends on past performance. We investigate the optimality of two types of promotion hierarchies: (i) internal labor markets, in which agents have a...