Almost a decade ago, Paul Milgrom and John Roberts (1988, p. 450), two of the leaders in the formalist branch of the New Institutional Economics, made the following observation. "The incentive based transaction costs theory has been made to carry too much of the weight of explanation in the...

In an earlier paper, I criticized Schumpeter's account of the obsolescence of the entrepreneur in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. That account rests, I argued, on a confusion about the nature of scientific knowledge and its role in the competences of the firm. This paper is an attempt to...

Recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative, associated with Berle and Means (1932) and Alfred Chandler (1977), in which the American model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable...

T0 the practical mind, particularly one trained in economics, it might sound a trifle paradoxical to suggest that the truly important issues in a public policy debate have nothing to do with the relative efficacy of the policy options. Paradoxical or not, this is very often the case. And there...

Recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative, associated with Berle and Means (1932) and Chandler (1977), in which the American model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable...