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...

Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine share trading activity over the period 1882 to 1920 for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, one of the largest UK companies of the time. Our main finding is that the steady flow of rentiers into the shareholding constituency of this...

This chapter focuses on a particular typology of family firms – the larger ones – in Europe. Its aim is to identify and discuss the main common characteristics of big European family firms, as well as the determinants of their enduring persistence. In order to achieve this, the dynamic and...

Our objective here is to establish the proposition that creative entrepreneurship gives rise to a market order which is optimally adjusted to facilitate the introduction and the diffusion of innovations, particularly those that take the form of new markets, new organizational schemes, new...

This article examines the role of ambiguity in processes of institutional change. One challenge for understanding institutional change is to overcome the rather "oversocialized" view of action within Institutional theory. Drawing upon recent work in sociology, the paper introduces a...

This article uses a prosopographical methodology and a new dataset of 1,558 CEOs from Britain's largest public companies between 1900 and 2009 to analyse how the role, social background, and career pathways of corporate leaders changed. We have four main findings: First, the designation of CEO...

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...

The 'sub-agentschap' of de Nederlandsche Bank did not figurate in the Bank Act 1863, but turned out to develop as a steppingstone between a correspondent and an agency of the Bank. This article considers the history of the office at Leyden, where between 1865 and 1969 a whole lifecycle of a...

This paper studies the origins of trademark registration in Spain and offers, for the first time, data across sectors and regions with a long-term perspective. In apparent contradiction to the slow path of industrialization and the economic backwardness of Spain between 1850 and the 1940s,...

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...