This paper documents the long-term nature of technological innovations which have transformed retail finance and addressed financial exclusion. The paper also contributes to the body of literature on the state as an entrepreneur. The roots of financial inclusion are traced back to the 1960s with...

Ogilvie's The European Guilds is a major contribution to economic history and institutional economics. This review essay surveys the main contributions of Guilds, locating it in a long-standing debate over whether craft guilds contributed positively or negatively to economic development in...

The Research Handbook on the History of Corporation and Company Law is a collection of 25 chapters surveying the history of corporation law from ancient times to the present in jurisdictions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This Introduction briefly summarizes the chapters, and suggests...

This introductory piece provides some context to the special edition on business and economic history of Chile and Latin America. It also provides an introduction to better understanding research and method in business history while inviting for this field to be further developed in Chile

Russian Abstract: Предлагаемая статья посвящена малоизученной в научной литературе проблеме ликвидации институциональных дефицитов в нормативно-правовом обеспечении...

We analyze the price of paintings in Dutch inventories and auctions of the Golden Age. The econometric investigation emphasizes correlations between prices adjusted for inflation and characteristics of the paintings, of the painters, of the owners (job, religion, size of the house) and, in case...

We analyze the labor market for painters in Baroque Rome using unique panel data on primary sales of still lifes, portraits, genre paintings, landscapes and figurative paintings. In line with the traditional hierarchy of genres, average price differentials between them were high. We identify...

We study the XVII century market for figurative paintings in Italy, analyzing original contracts between patrons and artists: this is one of the first manufacturing markets for which econometric evidence of the basic laws of economics can be found. Size of paintings, expected quality, type of...

We analyze organization of auctions and bidding strategies with a unique dataset on Paris auctions between 700s and 800s. Prices reflect the objective features of the paintings and of the sale, and they reveal a substantial death effect, with upward jumps in the years after the death of the...

Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the "good" nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social systems,...