Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the rise of large firms%u2019 investments in in-house R&D spelled the doom of the entrepreneurial innovator. We explore this idea by analyzing the career patterns of successive cohorts of highly productive inventors from the...

The growth of the U.S. economy over the nineteenth century was characterized by a sharp acceleration in the rate of inventive activity and a dramatic rise in the relative importance of highly specialized inventors as generators of new technological knowledge. Relying on evidence compiled from...

We compare the law governing business organizational forms in France and the United States during the nineteenth century and find that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the contracting environment in the U.S. was neither freer nor more flexible than in France. U.S. businesses had a more...

Geographic clustering in inventive activity has often been attributed to clustering in production. For the glass industry, we find that despite a general association between location of invention and production, there were significant deviations. Centers of production were not always centers of...