This book addresses the related problems of regulating and pricing access in network industries. Interconnection between network suppliers raises questions of how to sustain competition and realize economic efficiency. New entrants must have access to customers in a competitive industry, but the...

Combining theoretical work with careful historical description and analysis of new data sources, History Matters makes a strong case for a more historical approach to economics, both by argument and by example. Seventeen original essays, written by distinguished economists and economic...

This book challenges the static, ahistorical models on which Economics continues to rely. These models presume that markets operate on a "frictionless" plane where abstract forces play out independent of their institutional and spatial contexts, and of the influences of the past. In reality, at...

Checks remained local payments instruments throughout virtually the entire nineteenth century. Their significant use in interregional transactions dates only to the 1890s. We explain their lagged spatial diffusion by the evolution of centralized payments institutions to coordinate transactions...