Successful apprenticeship is often explained by effective contract enforcement. But what happened when enforcement was weak? This paper reveals that within early modern London, England’s dominant centre for training, the city’s court provided apprentices with near automatic exits from their...

This study finds that the development process of the Kiryu silk weaving district in Japan from 1895 to 1930 can be divided at least into the two phases, i.e., Smithian growth based on the inter-firm division of labor using hand looms and Schumpeterian development based on factory system using...

This paper investigates the long-run development of China's treaty ports from the mid-eighteenth century until today. Focusing on a sample of prefectures on the coast or on the Yangtze River, I document the dynamic development paths of treaty ports and their neighbors in alternate phases of...

There are wide and persistent differences in productivity across firms and countries. A new CEP study - conducted jointly with McKinsey & Company - uses a pioneering approach to measure management practices and assess their importance in driving these variations in economic performance.

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 731 medium sized manufacturing firms in Europe and the US. We find these are strongly associated with better firm performance in terms of productivity, return on capital employed (profitability), Tobin’s Q and sales...

The development of the ‘network economy’ and project-based work challenge established methods of regulating employment relationships. There appears to be an unsatisfied demand for its greater use, especially among employers, and this may be blocked by the lack of suitable contractual forms.....

This paper examines integration decisions of successive duopolists. It is shown that qualitatively the same pattern of integration emerges whether there is Cournot or Bertrand competition in the input market. The degree of integration in the industry is increasing in the size of the downstream...

This article considers the impact of European integration on industrial relations. An industrial relations regime can be understood as a tension between employment structured by market dynamics and broader social regulation, between the principles of contract and status. Economic Europeanisation...