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...

We document two puzzling facts during the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. First, we find no significant differences among US life insurers' profitability before or after 1918. Second, there are fewer insurers in distress after the outbreak. We argue that an increase in insurance demand offset...

No. We document two empirical facts for the U.S. life insurance sector during the 1918–19 Influenza pandemic. First, we find no significant differences among U.S. insurers’ profitability after 1918. Second, there were fewer insurers in distress after the pandemic outbreak. Using synthetic...

Official sources state that the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice was created by Attorney General Homer S. Cummings in 1933, but no corroboration is provided. This note carefully examines the events of 1933 as well prior history, and it discovers that the Antitrust Division...

The prevailing historical accounts of the formation of the US aircraft “patent pool” in 1917 assume the US government necessarily intervened to alleviate a patent hold-up among private aircraft manufacturers. We show these accounts to be inconsistent with the historical facts. We show that...

Clients recently approach us for equity strategy related to the shale gas industry. On one hand, shale gas is viewed as “the biggest energy innovation of the decade” and can significantly expand the supply for the US and the whole world. One the other hand, the current depressed natural gas...

The Trump administration has promised to stop the spiraling down of the U.S. coal industry that has been going on for several years. We discuss the origins of the decline of the U.S. coal industry and new policy interventions by the Trump administration. We find that a further decrease of coal...

The standard real-options model predicts that increased uncertainty discourages investment. When projects are large and take time to build, however, this prediction can be reversed. We investigate the investment/uncertainty relationship empirically using historical data on opening dates of new...