This article traces the history of the life sciences business in the Cambridge–Boston area and explores how it became the global epicenter of the modern therapeutics industry. While business history scholarship on therapeutics is extensive, few have studied recent technological modalities—from therapeutic proteins to cell and gene therapies—or adopted a regional ecosystem perspective. Based on archival materials and oral histories, this research bridges these works and incorporates insights from the innovation ecosystems framework. It considers how dynamic interactions between an evolving network of complementary and interdependent actors, including therapeutics firms, universities, hospitals, and risk capital providers, enhanced innovative capacity. This perspective also illuminates how ecosystem strength derived from the co-evolution of actors—from universities restructuring technology transfer offices to academic scientists becoming entrepreneurs. The research further highlights the nonlinearity of innovation processes. It shows how an extraordinary interplay between structural advantage, serendipitous timing, and strategic actions cultivated an unparalleled capacity to translate emergent technologies into novel therapies.

Local content policies (LCPs) are key instruments of industrial policy used by middle-income countries (MICs) to capture segments of global value chains (GVCs). While, in principle, LCPs are very similar, in practice, they are highly diverse. What to prioritize, how to measure it, while promoting firms’ upgrade are decisions that create room for national varieties. Considering this background, we compare LCPs for the oil and gas sector in Brazil and Malaysia. Both countries have adopted different forms of LCP over time. While Brazil has adopted an inward-looking version of LCP focusing on import-substitution, job creation, and domestic production, Malaysia implemented a more outward-looking version, focusing on coownership by nationals and strategic supplier development with less emphasis on domestic production. We argue that two very diverse developmental policy paradigms embedded in each country explain these different trajectories. In Brazil, a productivist version of developmentalism focused on domestic output underplayed the importance of integrating in GVCs. In contrast, an ethnic-based version of developmentalism in Malaysia was more flexible and allowed a better integration of domestic companies in GVCs. Our analysis sheds light on the importance of the interaction between ideas, interests, and institutions, focusing on how LCPs can build internationally competitive companies.

Market-oriented theorizing fails to capture the reality of government intervention in the global economy. Trade and investment measures by governments around the globe, designed to protect strategic industries and maintain a security of supply in the wake of a return to strategic competition, are emblematic of the need to shift our analysis of the global economy. We have labeled this phenomenon “new economic statecraft” and have invited this special issue to examine this phenomenon across countries and sectors of the global economy. Traditionally, economists have largely focused on efficiency gains and the reduction of transaction costs rather than considering the political and strategic aspects of trade and capital flows. This existing analysis fails to capture the reality that many governments are using economic levers to compete in “strategic” sectors of their economy through intervention at the border, behind the border, and beyond the border. To analyze these phenomena, this article and the associated special issue investigates five theorized drivers of state intervention in the global economy to explain when and how governments intervene in their markets. We also hope that this approach can help guide further empirical work on state-business relations and global political and economic competition.

Life in society is a function of the tension between the tangible and the intangible, although human beings have a natural tendency to give more attention and meaning to what their senses directly perceive. If there is smoke, we believe there is fire. AI, understood in a broad sense, is becoming the new electricity or even the new oxygen. A technology deified in such a disruptive, omnipotent, and omnipresent way that it will revolutionize all dimensions of society, from work, mobility, teaching, health, business, and the very nature of life. However, the deep and structurally unsustainable material dimension of this technology has received less attention and without smoke no one looks for the origin of the fire, and it spreads at a speed never seen before. The objective of this article is to identify the main layers of AI’s materiality, questioning its apparent benevolent relationship with management.

Management practices are constantly changing amid intense competitive global pressure. This can put a strain on managers in terms of adapting to new challenges that arise from rapid transformations. While there is an emphasis on timely transformations in order to increase efficiency and productivity gains, there can also be a relaxation when managers have reached their pinnacle and achieved their goals. The goal of this editorial is to focus on hot management trends which is an important topic given the ever shifting business environment. Well-known academics were asked to write about what they see as the main management trends affecting society at the current time period. They each have diverse views based on their area of expertise and thought processes. For the Journal of Management & Organization, it is critical that we look into management trends in order to inform practice but also to enrichen theory. It is exciting times with many things happening regarding management that makes it exciting to read about what may occur in the future.

Using firms’ online job postings, we identify economically related peer firms in the labor market. Firms’ labor peers are vastly different from their industry peers, where the overlap is about 20%. Returns of labor-linked firms strongly comove, suggesting common responses to labor market shocks on average. However, industry shocks can affect firms outside the industry through the labor network, leading to substitution effects between labor peers. Last, we show that investors do not promptly incorporate news about labor-linked firms, leading to predictable subsequent returns. A long-short strategy exploiting this delay generates an average annualized excess return of 9%.

In 2023, Princeton University Press published Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. It is a book of comparable mass to Alfred Chandler’s 1977 The Visible Hand and equally ambitious.1 The erudition is vast. (The bibliography alone runs 78 closely-printed pages. There are 122 pages of equally closely-printed footnotes to the 522-page main text whose own font is not large.) A production such as this seemed worth more than the usual traditional-form reviews, and in the September following its publication, the Penn Economic History Forum put on a symposium to discuss it. Interest was widespread: attendance in the room was agreeably substantial and came from far beyond the seminar’s usual catchment area, and there were requests for the Zoom link to the proceedings from around the world. (The expense was not vast and the ratio of impact to expense was almost certainly favorable relative to ordinary seminars. The economic history community might not suffer from putting on more such events when suitable occasions arise.)

Bridging together the Middle-Income Trap (MIT) literature with the Global Value Chains (GVCs) approach may provide a more fine-grained understanding of the middle-income (MI) countries’ developmental dilemmas. While the former identifies the structural challenges these countries face, the latter provides analytical tools to explore how MI firms may overcome the hurdles posed by the global organization of production and trade as they strive to enter more technology- and knowledge-intensive segments of the GVCs. This paper undertakes this approach through four case studies of relevant Argentine firms pursuing upgrading in a natural resources-intensive and a classical manufacturing sector: agrobiotechnology and auto parts. Through a structured comparison, we inductively characterize three distinctive trajectories of upgrading, which we call subordinate, defiant, and path-breaking. They differ in the type of upgrading they entail, the technological and productive capacities required and the level of autonomy they grant to MI firms within the GVC. Furthermore, we identify two varying sets of factors—the organization of the GVC and the level of external support by domestic institutions—that make each trajectory more or less likely. The paper concludes by discussing the aggregate implications of each trajectory for countries seeking to break out of the MIT.

Why do companies sometimes lobby legislators directly and sometimes act predominantly through business associations? Although economic factors, such as size and profitability, are well-known determinants of companies’ decision to lobby, they alone cannot explain the choice in lobbying strategies. This paper provides an explanation for why companies sometimes choose to lobby collectively: reputation. When firms want to lobby in favor of a publicly unpopular position, channeling their efforts through business associations can help them shield themselves from reputational consequences. To test this theory, this paper provides evidence from firms’ lobbying on climate change. Combining climate-friendliness ratings of corporate lobbying with an original survey experiment, it demonstrates the existence of reputational costs from lobbying alone and shows that lobbying through business associations helps firms avoid such costs. For the study of lobbying positions, these results imply important systematic differences in the positions firms take alone and collectively.

Patterns of business opposition and support shape the pace and scope of environmental policy reforms. This article develops a theory of firm and business coalition position-taking that explains business unity and division over environmental policy. I argue that “coalition splintering”—divergent policy positions within a business coalition—is most likely when low-adjustment cost firms are under intense pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure over an environmental issue. Pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure influences firms’ genuine preferences for environmental policy when firms see environmental regulation as reputation-enhancing for their industry, and provides reputational benefits to firms willing to take a policy position in favor of regulation. However, powerful dynamics within business coalitions encourage unified opposition to environmental policy: firms want to maintain an effective business coalition and their influence within it given their engagement in multi-domain, multi-round policy processes, and can consequently be reluctant to break ranks to support environmental policy. Unified business support for environmental policy occurs when pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure and the inevitability of policy reform shift oppositional members of a business coalition to positions of strategic support. I substantiate my theoretical model using an original case study of oil and gas company position-taking on federal methane regulation in the United States.

This paper is based on public comments I submitted in 2023 to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on the draft revisions to its Circular A-4 guidance on “Regulatory Analysis.” It includes my comments as submitted and a “prologue” and “epilogue” written after OMB published the 2023 version of Circular A-4. The major issues discussed in my and the other public comments on the 2023 revisions have been long been, and will remain, central to the practice of regulatory BCA. My public comments compare the 2023 revisions to the principles and practice of standard efficiency-based benefit–cost analysis (BCA). Standard BCA is a tool to evaluate whether regulations fix market failures and improve economic efficiency. The 2023 revisions to Circular A-4 depart from standard BCA in important ways.