This paper is an excerpt from a larger book project called The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, which chronicles and interprets the institutional and economic history – the life and times, if you will – of American business in the twentieth century. One integrating theme of the book is...

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire into which they believe it has fallen....

This paper explores the nature and causes of the cartel compliance crisis that befell the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) one year after its passage in 1933. We employ a simple game-theoretic model of the NIRA's cartel enforcement mechanism to show that the compliance crisis can largely...

In 1973 the British academic Ronald Dore published what was to become one of the most influential books ever written in the fields of industrial sociology and Japanese studies. British Factory-Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations (Dore, 1973) was a...

We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in industries, like steel, with...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor...