Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

En las páginas que siguen se estudia, siguiendo las vicisitudes biográficas de un ingeniero militar madrileño y más tarde director de empresas, la formación de un grupo empresarial que se ocupó de la promoción industrial y de la gestión de servicios públicos en las provincias de Granada...

Capital intensive industries in specialized niches of production have constituted solid ground for family firms in Spain, as evidenced by the experience of the iron and steel wire industries between 1870 and 2000. The embeddedness of these firms in their local and regional environments have...

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the Second industrial revolution and the end of the XX century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an...

Questo studio si propone di analizzare le caratteristiche del lavoro e dei rapporti di lavoro di lunga durata instaurati alla Sezione II-Ferroviaria della Società Italiana E. Breda per Costruzioni Meccaniche, durante la prima metà del Novecento. La ricerca si focalizza sulla forza lavoro...

Artisans are usually considered as businessmen who don't advertise. The way the dvertising business organized itself at the beginning of the 20th century seems to relegate them out of his field. However, craftsmen do seem to use some kind of commercial communication. To exist in their territory,...

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli,...

The economic performance of a country depends, among other things, on the strategies and structures of its firms. In the framework that is designed by institutions and policies and determined by technology and macroeconomic cycles, entrepreneurs decide how to allocate available resources in...

The annexation of Savoy by France fuels the issue of the fate of Banque de Savoie, because Banque de France was reluctant to share its monopoly as bank of issue, which explains the absorption of its rival in 1865. A second issue was the creation of local banking tools, embedded in regional...

This paper offers an overview of the modern Economic History of an interior Spanish province (Valladolid). It investigates the reasons of the economic retardation of this central region in contrast with the periphery of the country. It also presents the unknown attempts of the local business...