At the beginning of the twentieth century, US tobacco manufacturers were not forging ahead of their leading European counterparts in technology, productivity or managerial techniques. On some indicators, including per capita cigarette consumption, the USA strikingly lagged much of the rest of...

Zitzewitz's suggestion, in a Journal of Industrial Economics March 2003 article, that Britain's pre-World War One lead over the USA in tobacco manufacturing productivity was due to its more competitive market cannot be sustained. A larger country sample shows a positive relationship between...

Before 1914, London, the financial centre of a country half the USA's size, had a stock exchange that was larger and qualitatively more developed than New York for both domestic and overseas financing needs. J. P. Morgan's higher profits in New York arose partly from conflicted deals that would...