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- February 2022
- Article
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva
This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We build a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920, and a historical state-level corporate tax database with corporate tax...
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- January 2022
- Technical Note
Deglobalization and Alternative Futures
By: Geoffrey Jones and Valeria Giacomin
This note reviews the evidence that the world is undergoing an era of de-globalization. It shows that available metrics show some support for this theory. However there is also evidence that what is happening might be better described as regionalization. The nature of...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.
By: Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Tabellini
How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrants' assimilation in host societies? This paper offer the first systematic answer to this question by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the U.S. between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to...
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- 2021
- Chapter
The Economics of Historical Immigration to the United States
By: Marco Tabellini
Between 1850 and 1920, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million Europeans moved to the United States. European immigrants provided ample supply of cheap labor as well as specific skills and know-how, contributing to American economic growth. These...
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- Article
Business Investment in Education in Emerging Markets Since the 1960s
By: Valeria Giacomin, Geoffrey Jones and Erica Salvaj
This article examines non-profit investments by business in education in emerging markets between the 1960s and the present day. Using a sample of 110 interviews with business leaders from an oral history database, the study shows that more than three-quarters of such...
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- Summer 2021
- Article
The Origin and Development of Firm Management
This paper examines the historical origin and diffusion of management practices. Despite their centrality in the modern world, the concepts of ‘management’ developed fairly recently. Only with the Industrial Revolution, due to the increased firm size, owners needed a...
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- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic...
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Keywords:
Impact Investing;
Development Economics;
Developing Countries and Economies;
Renewable Energy;
Climate Change;
Environmental Sustainability;
Borrowing and Debt;
Credit;
Equity;
Bonds;
Financing and Loans;
Growth and Development;
Emerging Markets;
Non-Governmental Organizations;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Investment;
Decision Making;
Financial Services Industry;
Energy Industry;
Zambia
- 2021
- Chapter
Sostenibilidad y negocios verdes en América Latina
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter in the first-ever business history textbook on Latin America examines the impact of modern business enterprise on the natural environment of the region between the 19th century and the present day. It argues that although global capitalism created much...
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- 2020
- Book
American Business History: A Very Short Introduction
By: Walter Friedman
By the early twentieth century, it became common to describe the United States as a "business civilization." President Coolidge in 1925 said, "The chief business of the American people is business." More recently, historian Sven Beckert characterized Henry Ford's...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Of Learning and Forgetting: Centrism, Populism, and the Legitimacy Crisis of Globalization
By: Rawi Abdelal
Every order is a bargain with disappointments and trade-offs. Thus is every order an unstable equilibrium. The first era of globalization, circa 1870–1914, created both international prosperity and domestic instability. That instability was fully realized during the...
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- 2020
- Article
Inconvenient Truths: Interpreting the Origins of the Internet
By: Shane Greenstein
A conventional economic narrative provides intellectual underpinnings for governments to subsidize research and development ("R&D") that coordinates risky research to benefit many in society. This essay compares this narrative with the origins and invention of the...
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Keywords:
Lead Users;
Technology Transfer;
Internet;
History;
Analysis;
Research and Development;
Governance;
Technology;
Policy
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Seeds of Ideology: Historical Immigration and Political Preferences in the United States
By: Paola Giuliano and Marco Tabellini
We study the long run effects of immigration on U.S. political ideology. We establish a new result: historical European immigration is associated with stronger preferences for redistribution and a more liberal ideology among Americans today. We hypothesize that...
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- May 2020
- Article
Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences
By: Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke and Armin Falk
This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document...
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- January 2020
- Case
The Origins of Bell Labs
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
In 1947, scientists at Bell Labs invented the transistor—a tiny signal amplifier that would go on to become the fundamental building block of the digital age. But, confounding most traditional economic assumptions, it was not a vigorous startup that made this momentous...
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- 2020
- Book
Business, Ethics and Institutions: The Evolution of Turkish Capitalism in Global Perspectives
By: Asli M. Colpan and Geoffrey Jones
This book is the first systematic scholarly study on the business history of Turkey and its predecessor the Ottoman Empire from the nineteenth century until the present. It places the distinctive characteristics of capitalism in Turkey within a global and comparative...
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- January 2020
- Article
Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration
By: Marco Tabellini
In this paper, I jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration and study the causes of anti-immigrant sentiments. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the...
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- November 2019 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Russia: A Drama In Three Acts
By: Rawi Abdelal, Rafael Di Tella, Galit Goldstein and Sogomon Tarontsi
The collapse of central authority in the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a period of revolutionary transformations for the states that emerged in its wake. The leaders of Russia, the USSR's successor, struggled to reestablish central authority while also seeking to...
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Keywords:
Business ＆ Government Relations;
Developing Countries;
Government Policy;
Policy Change;
Policy Making;
Economic Systems;
Economics;
Globalization;
Emerging Markets;
Privatization;
Non-Renewable Energy;
Governance;
Global Strategy;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Business History;
Lawfulness;
Problems and Challenges;
Business and Government Relations;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Strategy;
Change Management;
Russia;
Moscow
- November 2019 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Danone: Changing the Food System
By: David E. Bell, Federica Gabrieli and Daniela Beyersdorfer
Emmanuel Faber, Chairman and CEO of the food and beverage company Danone, believed that humankind had only ten years to bend the curve on climate change and restore the biodiversity that the global food and agricultural ecosystem was critically dependent on. Upon...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
The Great Convergence: Skill Accumulation and Mass Education in Africa and Asia, 1870-2010
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
While human capital has gained prominence in new vintages of growth theory, economists have struggled to find the positive externalities of mass education in developing economies. We shed new light on the economic significance of the global 'schooling revolution' by...
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Keywords:
Mass Education;
Skill Premium;
History;
Human Capital;
Education;
Competency and Skills;
Labor;
Cost;
Africa;
Asia
- October 2019 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
Myanmar: Special Economic Zones
By: Willy Shih and Dawn Lau
This case examines four Special Economic Zones in Myanmar. While the country's development had been hobbled by a complex history of military rule, ethnic conflict, and international sanctions, as it pursued liberalization it sought avenues to developing its economy....
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