This paper examines Gibrat's law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat's law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport trevolution, and...

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit...

We investigate the role of industrial structure in labor productivity growth in U.S. cities between 1880 and 1930 using a new dataset constructed from the Census of Manufactures. We find that increases in specialization were associated with faster productivity growth but that diversity only had...