This paper examines major privately-owned British railway companies before World War I. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed, total factor productivity growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies...

Economic evaluation has an important role in helping to make decisionsabout the use of scarce resources in an explicit and rational manner, yeteconomic evaluation is not well-developed in many areas of socialwelfare. This paper looks at the reasons for this, focusing on whateconomists could do...

This paper uses recently digitised samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late 17th century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture;...

This paper examines the effect of a new technology on a labour-intensive service. Comparing primal and dual TFP-growth with final-year social savings, we find that, between 1900 and 1938, motion pictures increased entertainment output (measured in spectator-hours) by at least nine percent...

This article examines the hypothesis that in the “Third Reich”, bureaucratic agencies engaged in economic policies competed with each other. First, a model of competition is constructed whose predictions are then compared with actual political processes in Nazi Germany. This shows that the...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positiverelationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain eventhough many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixingagreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 RestrictivePractices Act and...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographicallocations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private andpublic sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on thecontrast between the strategies supported by the public and privatesectors in governing bioinformatic...

This paper presents a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with imperfectcompetition and nominal price rigidities in which productivity shocks coexist withmarkup shocks. After analyzing the features of the optimal cooperative solution, we showthat this allocation can be implemented in a...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor ofone party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice.We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of partycompetition and show how this affects party strategy in theory. Theusefulness of the...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...