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Full-Text Articles in Economic History

Did Antebellum Illinois Free Banks Take Undue Risk With Their Bond Portfolios?: An Analysis Of Decision-Making Prior To The Civil War, Scott N. Clayman Apr 2015

Did Antebellum Illinois Free Banks Take Undue Risk With Their Bond Portfolios?: An Analysis Of Decision-Making Prior To The Civil War, Scott N. Clayman

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Free banks in Illinois could issue bank notes backed by state or U.S. bond collateral. A decline in bond prices as the Civil War approached resulted in banks being unable to redeem their noteholders in gold specie and subsequently resulted in bank failures. Previously economic historians believed that failures of free banks were due to wildcat banking rather than the portfolio allocation of free banks. Over time, other researchers have found that banks that took greater ex ante risk prior to the failure were more likely to fail. There were other price declines during the 1850s, in particular the Panic …


The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jul 2011

The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …


Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2009

Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large publicly held business corporation became identified with excessive managerial power at the expense of stockholders, social irresponsibility, and internal inefficiency. Neoclassical economists both then and ever since have generally been critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, within …


The Geography Of Innovation Commercialization In The United States During The 1990s, Joshua L. Rosenbloom Feb 2007

The Geography Of Innovation Commercialization In The United States During The 1990s, Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

This article analyzes the geographic distribution and interrelationship of three measures of innovation commercialization across the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States and estimates a model of the factors explaining variations in the location of innovation commercialization. Innovation commercialization tends to be highly concentrated geographically, suggesting the presence of substantial external economies in these functions. Beyond these scale effects, however, the author finds that university science and engineering capacity and local patenting activity both help to account for intercity differences in the level of innovation commercialization activity.