The author traces and evaluates the major trends in the history and theory of the modern corporation: the literature dealing with market control, the New Business History that emphasizes efficiency, and recent developments by the Chicago School and the theorists of transactions costs. He concludes with an analysis of the recent problems U.S. corporations have experienced in managing innovation.

Based on the mercantile model of urban growth, I analyze the formative development of Atlanta during the antebellum period. Located at the intersection of three railroads, Atlanta's early growth and economic structure reflected its nodal position in the transport system. Subsequent railroad construction, however, eroded its initial locational advantage, while creating the opportunity for its emergence as a regional metropolis. This transformation was delayed until after the Civil War because of the marginal political and economic position of Atlanta and the Upcountry region, as a whole, within the state.

The connection between the spatial pattern of the urban growth spurt of the 1880s and the mortgage market is an aspect of the familiar capital market segmentation hypothesis that has received little attention. Although mortgage lending expanded most rapidly in the smaller western cities during the decade, I conclude that an underlying pattern of segmentation impeded urbanization in these areas at least until 1890. The initial advantage that segmentation conferred on borrowers in the East was reduced to some extent by binding usury ceilings along the Atlantic seaboard.

I study the changing role of the banknote market in interregional financial arrangements of the antebellum American economy, using the Old Northwest as a case study. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the cyclical behavior of the banknote market, I conclude that the role of the banknote market in interregional balance of payments adjustments declined as the Old Northwest became more closely integrated into the external financial system.

The article uses recent exchange-rate data to explore the progressive integration of early eighteenth-century, West European financial markets. The process climaxed in 1719 and 1720 with the Mississippi Bubble in Paris, the South Sea Bubble in London, and the insurance bubbles in Hamburg and throughout Holland. Only Paris failed to integrate permanently into the new multinational network.

The article examines the diffusion of waterworks in one hundred Rhenish Prussian towns. It exploits features of the institutions of local political representation to develop and estimate a median voter model of demand for water capacity. The results suggest that rising income of the median voter and demand of industrial users, rather than crises in public health, spurred the installation of improved water supply.

The article examines the development of the insurance function of trade unions. It analyzes how such policies worked, and why union benefit packages differed across occupations. It also addresses the impact of insurance policies on union organization. Insurance benefits increased the ability of unions to attract and retain members. They did not, however, significantly increase the power of union leaders relative to employers or union rank and file.

I investigate health as determined by nonsurvival in manuscript schedules of families matched in successive censuses. Losses were systematically greater for infants of the unskilled and of residents in large cities; for young children who lived on the frontier or had more young siblings; and for women who lived on the frontier or in the South. The findings have implications for fertility studies based on child-woman ratios, estimation of interregional migration, generality of regional mortality studies, slave-white differences in health, the modern rise of population, and wealth estimation from probate records.

In terms of revenues and expenditures, local government was the largest component of the U.S. federal system in 1902. Although it has been conjectured that this was also true during most of the nineteenth century, the evidence to support the conjecture is weak. We present a summary of a large sample of data for individual cities in 1850, 1860, and 1870, and link it to census data for 1880, 1890, and 1902.We study effects of city size and geographical location, and trends over time in city fiscal activity. Our provisional conclusion is that local government became the largest of the three components in the federal system only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

In the Netherlands a kind of urban system emerged very early in the sea provinces, but inland the country cities functioned as regional capitals without many links to cities outside their regions. After 1800 political and economic unification accelerated and the peripheral towns lost their independence. Using two indicators—the division of labor and migration—the article analyzes how this process of integration took shape after 1850.

Aggregate trade data appear to support the mercantilist position that colonial markets were very important for the French economy after 1945. After summarizing and then criticizing arguments based on these data, this article concludes that the economic utility of the empire to France was in fact more spurious than real.

This paper examines the five-dollar day compensation policy instituted by the Ford Motor Company in 1914 in light of recent developments in wage-determination theory. The new wage was above the opportunity cost of the labor employed. Yet various efficiency wage theories, by which high wages increase output, are shown to provide an implausible explanation. The particular (and epochal) technical change that occurred at Ford and the attitudes and beliefs of relevant actors suggest instead a rent-sharing theory driven by the threat of collective action by labor. This confluence, not the money, marks the episode as a watershed.

This article discusses the Russian private banking houses between 1870 and 1914. The author concludes that these enterprises played an important, and largely unregulated, role in the Russian credit system prior to 1914. Their conflicts with the Ministry of Finance testify to the growing influence of business circles in Russian life shortly before the war.