According to many authors, so-called “central planning” had disappeared from European countries by 1989. However, this is by no means certain. Many former centrally planned economies still engage in central planning, in both the private and public sectors. Moreover, there is a striking...

We find new facts that relate the evolution of firm scope to the changing frictions in external capital markets over the last three decades. We find that large, diversified publicly traded firms increase their scope during times of high external capital market frictions, such as in the recent...