This article examines how merchants in early modern Japan (1600–1868) created large-scale enterprises that contained multiple stores across several jurisdictions and employed hundreds of staff in the absence of formal legal institutions designed to facilitate the formation of complex businesses. It argues that early modern merchants made use of the household (ie) to construct fictive entities that looked, wrote, and acted like individual merchants on paper, but could be controlled by different people, divided into shares, and used to shield assets from claims by local creditors and rulers. Through the clever deployment of these fictive entities, merchants constructed expansive business empires. The article uses the archive of the Nakai Genzaemon, one of the period’s wealthiest merchants, to show how these entities worked, then compares the Nakai’s organization with other premodern businesses inside and outside of Japan. Based on this analysis, the conclusion offers a critique of institutional approaches to the study of economic and business history as well as suggestions toward a new understanding of the relationship between business, state, and society in early modern Japan.

This article examines efforts to remake the European economy in the late twentieth century through innovations in organized business and industrial policy. By narrating the development of the “Big 12 Roundtable” and the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) in the 1970s and 1980s, we show how the executive institution of the European Commission responded to global competitive pressures by creating “business forums”—groups of business elites organized by policymakers to serve as policy consultants—and by developing extensive technology and research programs to support the development of European technology firms. We then trace how the Big 12 Roundtable laid the foundation for other business forums, including the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), and how ESPRIT paved the way for the framework programs that have been hallmarks of European industrial policy and investment in research and development for half a century. Consequently, this article expands the business historical genealogy of organized business in Europe and contributes a new history of European industrial policy.

This paper examines the micropolitics of corporate domicile relocation through the case of Tanganyika Concessions, a British company that shifted its headquarters from the United Kingdom to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1952. Drawing on archival sources like the Rio Tinto Collection, the British National Archives, and the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) archives, it reconstructs how internal and external actors shaped the relocation process. A central influence came from an informal network of U.S.-based investors—dubbed the “American Group,” whose capital was actively courted and whose conditions reshaped corporate strategy. The analysis reveals the power dynamics among major shareholders, including Anglo American, Rio Tinto, UMHK, and the Bank of England, showing how competing interests required continual negotiation. The study demonstrates that corporate relocations are politically charged processes embedded in imperial decline and the reconfiguration of postwar global capital.

Despite growing interest in generative artificial intelligence for creative work, the mechanisms driving individuals’ psychological readiness and intention to adopt these tools remain understudied. This paper examines how self-leadership – a proactive process of self-influence – enhances generative artificial intelligence acceptance, individual confidence, and creative process engagement. Using a sample of 258 full-time employees, we tested a serial mediation model linking self-leadership to creative process engagement via artificial intelligence acceptance and creative self-efficacy. The results reveal a significant positive direct relationship between self-leadership and creative process engagement, alongside a significant indirect effect through both mediators. This study contributes to the literature by uncovering the psychological mechanisms and strategies necessary to foster technological readiness and intention within creative contexts.

This article explores the career of Fritz L. Redlich and his influence on business history. Redlich completed his degree in economics in Berlin in 1914 when the German Historical School still dominated the field. He then had to withdraw his Ph.D. dissertation on the German tar industry because of his Jewish origin. In 1936, he left Germany for the United States, where he taught in several universities and also served in public administration. A major breakthrough in his career occurred when he answered the call to join the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University. There, in continuous dialogue with Joseph Schumpeter, Arthur Cole, and many other researchers, Redlich developed an interesting epistemological foundation for the newly born entrepreneurial history, a discipline bent on verstehen (“understanding”) and becoming an integral part of the social sciences. Via an international network of numerous students and scholars, Redlich was decisive in the emergence and diffusion of business history not only in the United States but also in Germany.

Although wage rates are lower when employers have monopsony power, we find that the value of a statistical life (VSL) is not reduced when labor markets are more concentrated. Because the estimated VSL is the product of the wage and the wage-risk tradeoff rate, a greater tradeoff rate in highly concentrated U.S. labor markets produces a larger VSL. The general relationship we find is robust with respect to different labor market data. Our results provide the first evidence contradicting policy-related concerns that the VSL is lower in monopsonistic labor markets. The average VSL is often about $13 million (USD 2022) both for the full sample and at the median market concentration level, and it does not decline at higher levels of HHI.

Despite the rapid development of the digital economy, its impact on corporate environmental responsibility remains unclear. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we suggest that city digitalization enhances regulatory and social stakeholder governance and, in turn, facilitates local firms’ corporate environmental investment (CEI). Utilizing data from 2,358 Chinese listed firms operating in environmentally sensitive industries from 2014 through 2019, our findings indicate that city digitalization positively affects CEI. Moreover, such positive impact is more pronounced in regions where environmental regulatory or social salience is high, and for firms with high levels of state share or top management team ownership. Our study sheds light on the governance function of digital development and provides valuable insights into how city digitalization helps address environmental challenges in emerging markets.

A longstanding puzzle for regulatory theory and practice has been the valuation of children’s lives, or more precisely, the valuation of mortality risks faced by children. There are data about parents’ willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce such risks, and that data might be used to estimate the value per statistical life (VSL) for children. The problem is that any such VSL comes from the parents’ valuations; it might not adequately capture the welfare effects of risk reduction for children themselves. It can be shown, however, that use of parental WTP, and the resulting VSL, is justified on four assumptions: (1) parents have adequate information, (2) parents do not suffer from a relevant behavioral bias, (3) parents have a limited budget for expenditures on their children, and regulation would amount to a forced exchange, producing a dollar-for-dollar reduction from that budget, and (4) parents are sufficiently motivated to care about their children’s welfare, so that parental judgments about how to allocate limited resources for their children promote their children’s welfare. If we relax one or more of these assumptions, the appropriate VSL for children might be different from, and potentially higher than, the VSL that emerges from use of parental WTP. Implementing the proposed framework presents serious but tractable empirical challenges.

The Covid-19 pandemic entailed a historic high in public spending. Some of these resources were channeled through interest organizations, such as business groups and non-profits. In this paper, we gauge potential inefficiencies in their distribution. Funds may be distributed according to the logic of rent-seeking, whereby organizations use lobbying to extract benefits from the state, or a pluralist logic of disturbances, where funding allocation follows organizational grievances. These two logics might even interact, meaning that organizations in need ought to signal their needs through lobbying first. We use data from two survey waves in eight European polities to test these arguments. Our findings provide support for theories of rent-seeking, showing that lobbying activities are associated with increases in public funding, whereas organizations’ needs and survival fears are not. However, our exploration of interaction effects nuances this picture. Our study sheds light on important dynamics behind resource allocation when crisis-related public spending is high.