"Concentration and Productivity: A Broader Perspective"

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 concentration and productivity, while accurate measurement of US and UK concentration shows similar concentration levels until 1911. The later US lead, though plausibly induced by antitrust-enforced competition, was due to tougher labour management rather than to stronger technical innovation.

"What did Morgan's Men really do?"

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 later be illegal, as they already were in London. His contributions to the rapid catch-up process by New York are more plausibly seen in terms of successful emulation of European precedents than the information signalling alleged in over-determined, "Whig" models of American financial innovation.

The London Stock Exchange 1869-1929: new bloody statistics for old?

Newly-assembled datasets on the size and composition of the London Stock Exchange present some results contradicting conventional wisdom. A forensic examination of one study of corporate equities in the Investor’s Monthly Manual between 1869 and 1929 suggests both idiosyncratic mistakes and generic biases which users of this source need to consider

"The Divorce of Ownership from Control from 1900: Re-calibrating Imagined Global Historical Trends"

In 1900 US business corporations were dominated by plutocratic family owners, while British and French quoted companies more commonly divorced ownership from control. 'Democratic' corporate governance rules explain some of Europe's precocity and London's exceptional listing requirement of large free floats was an important initial factor in manufacturing. Later in the twentieth century, the United States overtook France by further divorcing ownership from control. Business historians should direct their efforts to understanding why Britain was an early pioneer, with persistently wide shareholding, why America took decades to catch up, and why other countries did not build on their earlier lead. The pursuit of alternative (largely imagined) histories of national ownership differences could usefully be curtailed.

Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: a View from London in 1900 (Subsequently published in "Enterprise and Society", vol. 8, no. 3, September 2007, pp. 642-86. )

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination, incentives and reputation - developed by a serendipitous mix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism - set the scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and international corporations in the twentieth century.

"The Whig Fable of American Tobacco, 1895-1913"

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 the world. Fiscal discrimination against cigarettes, amplified by the monopoly pricing, strategic choices, and organizational overload of the American Tobacco trust, are among the retarding factors.

"Logistics, Market Size and Giant Plants in the Early 20th Century: A Global View"

Around 1900, the businesses of developed Europe - transporting freight by a more advantageous mix of ships, trains and horses - encountered logistic barriers to trade lower than the tyranny of distance imposed on the sparsely populated United States. Highly urbanized, economically integrated and compact northwest Europe was a market space larger than, and - factoring in other determinants besides its (low) tariffs - not less open to inter-country trade than the contemporary American market was to interstate trade. By the early twentieth century, the First European Integration enabled mines and factories - in small, as well as large, countries - to match the size of United States plants, where factor endowments, consumer demand or scale economies required that.

Twentieth century enterprise forms: Japan in comparative perspective

La Porta et al see Anglo-American common law as most favourable to economic development, but in 1899 Japan explicitly preferred the German corporate law tradition. Yet its new Commercial Code omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al see as the jewel in the crown of Germany’s organizational menu. Neither apparent “mistake” retarded Japan’s business development because its corporate laws offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. Surprisingly (given that Germany’s organizational menu predated Japan’s by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japanese businesses already used not only corporations proper (kabushiki kaisha) but also commandite partnerships (goshi kaisha, with more corporate characteristics than Anglo-American partnerships) more intensively than Germany. After the introduction of the yugen kaisha (a GmbH-equivalent) in 1940, corporate forms were nearly as widely used in Japan as in the US, the UK or Switzerland