The extent to which business groups ever existed in the United States and, if they did exist, the reasons for their disappearance are poorly understood. In this paper we use hitherto unexplored historical sources to construct a comprehensive data set to address this issue. We find that (1)...

We investigate the relation between firms' ownership structures and q ratios in Japan. At low levels of ownership by main banks, firms' q ratios fall as bank equity ownership rises. At higher levels of bank ownership, this relationship is mitigated and, in some specifications, even reversed. We...

Applications of Lagrange's method of undetermined mutipliers in physics and economics suggest some analogies between the two disciplinces. By using the work of E. T. Jaynes on information theory, the long standing problem of Maxwell's demon in thermodynamics can be cast as a constrained...