We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...

This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had...

Simon Szreter's book Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross-sectional differences in marital fertility asreported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter's conclusion made the book immediately influential, and...

Simon Szreter's book "Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940" argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross-sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter's conclusion made the book immediately influential,...

British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom to craft their own governance rules. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any part or all of the model and write their own...

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germany's debts from the period between the two world wars and allowed the country to re-establish its role in international capital markets. The Agreement wrote down the overall debt by about 50 percent, gave the debtors a much longer period to repay, and...