This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research...

The objective of this work is to run through some of the organizational characteristics of voluntary production, such as open source, the professions and scientific communities. To do so, the work considers production as division of labor rather than as production function. It finds that...

By employing modularity theory, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes, e.g., collective invention and open science besides open-source software production. We focus on how open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor. We find that open-source...

This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research...

Richard Langlois, Tony Yu & Paul Robertson have assembled a collection of previously published papers that move beyond textbook production theory. This essay discusses work by Frank Knight and Hendrik Houthakker not reproduced in LYR in relation to the capability theory of economic organization....

This work shows that the modular organization of voluntary Open Source Software (OSS) production, whereby programmers supply effort of their accord, capitalizes more on division than on specialization of labor. This is so because voluntary OSS production is characterized by an organizational...

This essay brings fiscal federalism theory into contact with the knowledge perspective to economic organization. The question addressed is: can a central government be justified in the context of fiscal federalism on grounds of economic organization? We point out that if one looks at the...

The Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism, which draws upon contemporary economic and industrial organization theory, hitherto focuses only on the negative benefits of public decentralization: the potentially superior ability to align perverse incentives vis-à-vis the centralized...