Using newly constructed data series on explosions, deaths, and steamboat traffic, we examine econometrically the causes of increased safety in steamboat boilers in the nineteenth century. Although the law of 1852 (but not that of 1838) did have a dramatic initial effect in reducing explosions,...

This paper is an interpretive history of federal support for the American software industry from its beginnings through the 1980s. As in other high-technology cases, federal _ especially defense-related _ support for software was crucial early in the technology's development, but the flow of...

A central debate in industrial policy today is that between proponents of large vertically integrated firms on the one hand and advocates of networks of small specialized producers on the other. This paper argues that neither institutional structure is the universal panacea its enthusiasts...

The late F. A. Hayek is remembered for the argument that the decentralized price system has enormous advantages over planned systems in the critical areas of information transmission and the use of knowledge. In many minds, the recent fall of the Soviet-style economies in Eastern Europe has...

This essay seeks to locate the ideas of G. B. Richardson within the present-day discussion of the theory of the boundaries of the firm. Richardson differs from the mainstream of transaction-cost economics in that, like Coase and Knight before him, he sees the problem of market contracting as a...

Despite the enormous literature devoted to the subject, there remains little consensus about the organizational sources of innovativeness and inertia. On the one hand, the evolutionary or "capabilities" view of the firm leads us naturally to expect organizational inertia as a natural by- product...

There is a tradition in the literature of transaction-cost economics that seeks to explain the existence of firms in terms of the inherent superiority of firms as an organizational form in some circumstances. The problem with these arguments is that they tend to contrast real firms with an...

This paper presents a detailed case study of the cluster-tool segment of the American semiconductor-equipment industry. That industry has embarked upon a technological trajectory in which cluster-tool components (or modules) conform to a set of common interface standards. Cluster tools are thus...

In a series of classic works, most notably The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), Alfred Chandler focused the spotlight on the large, vertically integrated modern corporation. Put simply, Chandler’s argument is this. In the late nineteenth century, the large vertically integrated...

This essay is a reinterpretation of the debate over the origins of the factory system. In the end, it argues, the explanation for the rise of the factory system lies in the realm of organization, but not in the qualities of organization envisaged by either the "radical" view or the...