Recent sociological analysis of the extent to which modern British society hasbecome more meritocratic raises important conceptual issues for the recurrenteconomic history debate concerning the social mobility of Britain’s business leaders.The majority view in this debate is that high social...

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers’ behavioris affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where thereare no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensationscheme in...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

This paper presents a framework to analyze the potential changes in transaction costs due to theintroduction of e-commerce on transactions between businesses. It then illustrates and applies thisframework using internal data from an Internet-based firm to measure process improvements,marketplace...

The paper builds on a method proposed by Geary and Stark (2002) for estimating regional incomes in Victorian Britain. This is modified by using tax data to allocate non-wage income across regions. The results suggest that the coefficient of variation of regional GDP per head was rising rapidly...