The prominent role of monetary policy in the U.S. interwar depression has been conventional wisdom since Friedman and Schwartz [1963]. This paper presents evidence on both the surprise and the systematic components of monetary policy between 1929 and 1933. Doubts surrounding GDP estimates for...

The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by 1815. Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by economists as...

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay, and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology‐licensing offices using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

In this paper, we evaluate what we have learned to date about the effects of privatization from the experiences during the last fifteen to twenty years in the postcommunist (transition) economies and, where relevant, China. We distinguish separately the impact of privatization on efficiency,...

In many developed countries, house prices have been rising rapidly, mortgage debt has been increasing and affordability has worsened. It is in this context that the standard annuity mortgage is increasingly being supplanted by mortgages with non-standard features, such as longer terms or...

While most studies of the decision to immigrate focus on absolute income differences between countries, we argue that relative change in purchasing power or status, as captured by an individual's ranking in the wage distribution, may also be another important determinant of the migration...

This paper (a) provides a methodological taxonomy of pricing, financing, reimbursement, and cost containment methodologies for pharmaceuticals; (b) analyzes complex agency relationships and the health versus industrial policy tradeoff; (c) pinpoints financing measures to balance safety and...

This paper investigates the evidence for convergence in per capita incomes across 115 economies during the period 1950–1998 and examines the impact that international trade had on this process. Drawing on trade-conditioning within a distribution dynamics framework, that explicitly models...

We investigate the impact of market-supporting institutions on business strategies by analyzing the entry strategies of foreign investors entering emerging economies. We apply and advance the institution-based view of strategy by integrating it with resource-based considerations. In particular,...

This article examines the collusion between the only two major banks to operate in British West Africa for most of the colonial period after 1916, Barclays and the Bank of British West Africa. The companies’ records reveal that the alliance was more far-reaching than has previously been shown,...