In a series of classic works, most notably The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), Alfred Chandler focused the spotlight on the large, vertically integrated modern corporation. Put simply, Chandler’s argument is this. In the late nineteenth century, the large vertically integrated...

Using new data on explosions, deaths, and steamboat traffic, we examine econometrically the causes of increased safety in steamboats on the Western Rivers of the United States in the nineteenth century. Our conclusion is that, although the safety act of 1852 did have a dramatic initial effect in...

This essay is a reinterpretation of the debate over the origins of the factory system. In the end, it argues, the explanation for the rise of the factory system lies in the realm of organization, but not in the qualities of organization envisaged by either the "radical" view or the...

Institutional factors, especially those embodied in capabilities and routines, can both improve the ability of a firm to exploit an existing technology and make it more difficult to innovate by generating an inertia that is hard to overcome. As a result, periods of technological change are often...

This paper is an interpretive history of federal support for the American software industry from its beginnings through the 1980s. As in other high-technology cases, federal _ especially defense-related _ support for software was crucial early in the technology's development, but the flow of...

A central debate in industrial policy today is that between proponents of large vertically integrated firms on the one hand and advocates of networks of small specialized producers on the other. This paper argues that neither institutional structure is the universal panacea its enthusiasts...

The late F. A. Hayek is remembered for the argument that the decentralized price system has enormous advantages over planned systems in the critical areas of information transmission and the use of knowledge. In many minds, the recent fall of the Soviet-style economies in Eastern Europe has...

This essay seeks to locate the ideas of G. B. Richardson within the present-day discussion of the theory of the boundaries of the firm. Richardson differs from the mainstream of transaction-cost economics in that, like Coase and Knight before him, he sees the problem of market contracting as a...

Despite the enormous literature devoted to the subject, there remains little consensus about the organizational sources of innovativeness and inertia. On the one hand, the evolutionary or "capabilities" view of the firm leads us naturally to expect organizational inertia as a natural by- product...

There is a tradition in the literature of transaction-cost economics that seeks to explain the existence of firms in terms of the inherent superiority of firms as an organizational form in some circumstances. The problem with these arguments is that they tend to contrast real firms with an...