For a generation the federal government has maintained programs promoting research joint ventures (RJV's). The ostensible motivation late in the going was to promote knowledge spillovers. The real motivation was to stem the perceived decline of American competitiveness. It is not obvious,...

Looking out on the devastation wrought by the English Civil Wars, political philosophers found themselves contemplating how to harness collective action to obviate problems of collective irrationality. With the advent of competition law more than two centuries later, American courts were...

The research illuminates the role of financial structure (debt or equity financing) and contract renegotiation in enabling efficient adaptation over the course of long-term exchange. I provide evidence from a dataset of electricity marketing contracts about how electricity generators and...

Since at least the early nineteenth century, much of “political economy” had become occupied with “resource allocation”. It became occupied with understanding the relative merits of economic systems coordinated by decentralized processes (market-mediated exchange) or by centralized...

By the time a young Ronald Coase was composing “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), litigation had already started wending its way through American courts that took up questions that really anticipated Grossman, Hart and Moore on control rights and Simon and Williamson on adaptation, vertical...

How did European merchants finance the Commercial Revolution? Established narratives highlight roles for reputation effects or the risk-sharing afforded by commenda contracts in enabling merchants to mobilize investment for long-distance trade. In contrast, this study illuminates tradeoffs...