Arthur Wichmann’s “Earthquakes of the Indian Archipelago” documents several large earthquakes and tsunami throughout the Banda Arc region that can be interpreted as mega-thrust events. However, the source regions of these events are not known. One of the largest and well-documented events...

British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom to craft their own governance rules. In this paper we study the uses to which this flexibility was put by examining the articles of association written by three samples of companies from the late...

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The focus of this article is on legal-economic institutions that organized early-modern Eurasian trade. It identifies two such institutions that had divergent dispersion patterns, the corporation and the commenda. The corporation ended up as a uniquely European institution that did not migrate...

We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...

This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had...