As articulated by Adam Smith, one of the central issues facing companies is that managers will not run the business in the interests of its owners and will misuse resources. This ultimately has a detrimental consequence for the wealth of the nation. This survey reviews the nature and evolution...

The rise and fall of De Lorean Motor Cars Limited (DMCL) has been traditionally interpreted as the result either of John De Lorean´s psychological flaws or as confirming the supposedly inherent weaknesses in activist industrial policy. However, when the episode is examined in more detail,...

The aim pursued in this business history study is to assess whether LOEWE - an originally German-Jewish producer of consumer electronics - had the possibility as well as the capacity to build and preserve a learning base throughout the national-socialist period. Learning base is understood here...

In the last 15 years of the nineteenth century c.300 British brewers incorporated and floated securities on the stock market. Subsequently, in the 1900s, the industry suffered a long-lived hangover. In this paper, we establish the stylised facts of this transformation and estimate the gains...

Dieser Beitrag stellt mit Hilfe der Ordonomik einen systematischen Zusammenhang zwischen zwei unterschiedlichen Literaturen her, deren Fragestellungen zunächst inkommensurabel erscheinen: zwischen der akteurszentrierten Social Entrepreneurship- Literatur und der auf Institutionen ausgerichteten...

Cooperatively-owned Raiffeisen banks first emerged in the Netherlands in the late 1890s and spread rapidly across the country. Using a new dataset, we investigate the determinants of their market entry and early performance. We find that the cooperative organisational form, when allied to a...

We investigate a sample of 180 technology licensing contracts closed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering companies between 1880 and 1913. Our empirical results suggest that strategic behaviour seems to be relevant for the design of licensing contracts, whereas inventor...

In 1965 Sidney Pollard published The Genesis of Modern Management, an extended discussion of the problems, during Britain's initial period of industrialisation, of the 'internal management' of the firm. But, in his focus on industry, Pollard ignored one of the largest, most significant and most...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....