Were banks special intermediaries in late nineteenth century America? commentary

Banks and banking - History

Inventive Activity and the Market for Technology in the United States, 1840-1920

The growth of the U.S. economy over the nineteenth century was characterized by a sharp acceleration in the rate of inventive activity and a dramatic rise in the relative importance of highly specialized inventors as generators of new technological knowledge. Relying on evidence compiled from patent records, we argue that the evolution of a market for technology played a central role in these developments. Across both individuals and geographic areas, the expansion of opportunities to trade in patent rights was closely associated with increases in specialization at invention, as well as advances in rates of invention more generally. The patent system is often celebrated for the stimulus to invention provided by granting limited monopoly rights to inventors for the use of their discoveries, but its specification of tradable assets in technology has also been important.

Contractual Tradeoffs and SMEs Choice of Organizational Form, A View from U.S. and French History, 1830-2000

Today the vast majority of multi-owner firms in the United States are corporations, but that was not the case in the past. Before the advent of the income tax, tort litigation, and significant federal regulation, entrepreneurs more often than not chose to organize as partnerships, a form that economists consider seriously flawed. Why would they make such a terrible mistake? We begin by noting that corporations created new types of contracting problems for businesses at the same time as they solved problems afflicting partnerships. We then model the tradeoffs involved in the choice of corporations versus partnerships and confirm that the model’s assumptions are consistent with U.S. legal rules up through the 1940s. The model implies that partnerships and corporations are complementary organizational forms, and we show that data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures strongly supports that implication. We also verify that the model’s assumptions hold for the broader set of organizational choices available under the French Code de Commerce and use data on multi-owner firms registered in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to demonstrate the complementary character of the basic forms. Despite much literature emphasizing the fundamentally different environments for business associated with the French and U.S. legal regimes, the basic calculus underpinning the choice of organizational form was the same in both countries.

The Decline of the Independent Inventor: A Schumpterian Story?

Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the rise of large firms%u2019 investments in in-house R&D spelled the doom of the entrepreneurial innovator. We explore this idea by analyzing the career patterns of successive cohorts of highly productive inventors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We find that over time highly productive inventors were increasingly likely to form long-term attachments with firms. In the Northeast, these attachments seem to have taken the form of employment positions within large firms, but in the Midwest inventors were more likely to become principals in firms bearing their names. Entrepreneurship, therefore, was by no means dead, but the increasing capital requirements%u2014both financial and human%u2014for effective invention and the need for inventors to establish a reputation before they could attract support made it more difficult for creative people to pursue careers as inventors. The relative numbers of highly productive inventors in the population correspondingly decreased, as did rates of patenting per capita.

GEANT4 Target Simulations for Low Energy Medical Applications

The GEANT4 code offers an extensive set of hadronic models for various projectiles and energy ranges. These models include theoretical, parameterized and, for low energy neutrons, data driven models. Theoretical or semi-empirical models sometimes cannot reproduce experimental data at low energies(<100MeV), especially for low Z elements, and therefore recent GEANT4 developments included a new particle\hp package which uses evaluated nuclear databases for proton interactions below 200 MeV. These recent developments have been used to study target designs for low energy proton accelerators, as replacements of research reactors, for medical applications. Presented in this paper are results of benchmarking of these new models for a range of targets, from lithium neutron production targets to molybdenum isotope production targets, with experimental data. Also included is a discussion of the most promising target designs that have currently been studied