Jim Tozzi is an activist institutional economist. During his 19-year career in the federal civil service, he was a pertinacious institution builder, armed with a PhD in economics but never flaunting it. He gained a reputation, richly deserved in my experience, as a supreme bureaucratic tactician. But he applied his skills to antibureaucratic purposes. Incessantly, and occasionally at professional risk, he promoted and protected internal executive-branch procedures that used economic analysis, and measures of administrative effectiveness, against the incessant forces of political entropy, agency parochialism, and special-interest capture.

Jim Tozzi has for several decades been among the most dedicated and perceptive commentators on the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Indeed, Tozzi is arguably better suited than anyone to be the keeper of the OIRA flame: from his position in charge of the Office of Regulatory and Information Policy, OIRA’s predecessor organization, Tozzi contributed to the development of Executive Order (EO) 12291 and then stepped in as OIRA’s first Deputy Administrator. Since that time, he has been a steadfast defender of OIRA’s critical role in bringing rigorous analysis, quality control, and policy discipline to Executive Branch regulation. I share Tozzi’s view, and indeed that of all former OIRA officials I have spoken with, of OIRA’s importance to the regulatory state. Preservation of the strength and independence of the office is to me the principal criterion by which policy proposals that effect OIRA should be judged.

For decades, a strong case has been made for comprehensive reform of the U.S. federal government’s regulatory processes (for early contributions, see Weidenbaum & DeFina, 1978; Lave, 1981; Breyer, 1982; Harrison & Portney, 1983; Litan & Nordhaus, 1983; Viscusi, 1992; Breyer, 1993; Sunstein, 1996; Graham, 1996, 1997). Establishment of centralized Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oversight through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was an important achievement, but Congress has not yet passed comprehensive regulatory reform legislation.

Jim Tozzi has a wealth of knowledge and experience with cost-benefit analysis and centralized review of Executive Branch rulemaking. Mine is more limited, but nonetheless significant.1 And while I may agree with much of what he says in his article “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Past, Present and Future,” (Tozzi, 2019) I do see things differently than he does in a number of respects.

American discontent with offshore production features heavily in trade policy debates. But Americans more typically encounter offshore production in apolitical contexts as consumers. We argue that these ostensibly apolitical encounters with offshore production are, in fact, freighted with political consequences. This paper asks: When and for whom does consumer-based exposure to offshore production reduce support for free trade? This is an important in its own right, but also sheds light on the contexts in which more overtly political references to offshore production are likely to find the most fertile ground. We answer these questions using a survey experiment that embeds an offshoring “prime” into an advertisement for pet furniture, varying the location of production across different treatment groups. We find that our experimental exposure to offshore production depressed enthusiasm for free trade, but only when production occurred in China, and mainly among white men living near trade-related job loss. That heterogeneity resonates with work on the economic and social aspects of the decline in American manufacturing employment.

Entrepreneurs should act as stewards of entrepreneurial rent. Entrepreneurial rent is the difference between the ex post value of a venture and its ex ante costs. It is the result of competition among buyers and sellers within the market process rather than the sole efforts of the entrepreneur. As a result, entrepreneurs should allocate entrepreneurial rent for the benefit of other market participants rather than consuming it for themselves. The moral obligation to steward entrepreneurial rent is consistent with traditional bases of property rights and the norm of social welfare maximization, and it applies to corporations and their shareholders, as well as individual entrepreneurs.

We propose a simple metric to measure two aspects of market integration, namely, economic integration (defined as a common cash-flow dynamic) and financial integration (defined as a common risk-pricing dynamic) and then examine their evolution through time while controlling for volatility. We find that developed (DEV) countries exhibit greater degrees of financial and economic integration than emerging (EMG) markets. Although the financial integration gap between these markets remains large throughout the sample period, the EMG economies are catching up with their DEV counterparts in recent years; their level of economic integration has reached that of DEV countries.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

The recent arrival of women on corporate boards has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, most of the studies focus on very recent times. This article analyzes the presence of women on the corporate boards of the largest firms in Switzerland across the past hundred years. It shows that until the beginning of the 1970s, the very few women sitting on the boardrooms belonged to the families owning the firms. Two main factors contributed then to the progressive opening of the corporate elites to women. First, the extending in 1971 of “universal suffrage” to women led to a feminization of the political elites, and women with a political profile entered the boardrooms of firms in the distribution and retailing sector. Second, the increasing globalization of the economy at the end of the twentieth century contributed to weaken the cohesion of the very male and Swiss corporate elite. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the presence of women remained low in international comparison, and they were still hitting the “glass ceiling” regarding the top positions in the firm.

Using a novel database of firm patents and board characteristics across 45 countries, we examine both within- and cross-country determinants of board gender diversity and its relation to corporate innovation. Boards are more likely to include women in countries with narrower gender gaps, higher female labor market participation, and less masculine cultures. Firms with gender diverse boards have more patents and novel patents, and a higher innovative efficiency. Further analyses suggest that gender diverse boards are associated with more failure-tolerant and long-term chief executive officer (CEO) incentives, more innovative corporate cultures, and more diverse inventors, characteristics that are conducive to an improved innovative performance.

This paper proposes a classification of government expropriations of foreign property based on the types of alliances sought out by governments in their quest for support for those actions. Based on a review of historical literature and social science studies of expropriations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in the twentieth century, we define three types of alliances: with organized labor, with domestic business owners, or with sections of the civil service or the ruling party. We posit that each sector allying itself with the government expects rewards from the expropriation. We maintain that the type of alliance is determined by several factors, in particular, the longevity and legitimacy of the nation-state of the expropriating country, the strength of organized labor, and the political participation and strength of the domestic business sector. Our framework complements existing studies explaining when and why expropriations take place.

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

Despite the relevance of bankruptcy law for a number of key issues regarding business functioning and organization, little is known about the features and evolution of these legal institutions over time and space. This paper starts to fill this gap in current knowledge by analyzing a new data set providing consistent information about key features of bankruptcy law between 1850 and 2015 in the thirty largest European economies. Regarding institutional change, our analysis supports the established view of a link between macroeconomic changes and the introduction of procedures alternative to bankruptcy. However, this process shows significant differences at the national level, making it difficult to support the idea of change as the result of belonging to a given legal system (French; common law; Scandinavia; Germanic), or the degree of economic development. Instead, change in bankruptcy institutions seems to be a product of, and contributor to, the wider process of individual state formation. Similarly, the features of bankruptcy procedures seem to confirm this picture: Looking at their possible outcomes, the right to begin proceedings, and degree of application to different types of debtors, national differences appear deep and persistent, despite a generalized pattern of convergence over time toward a less punitive approach to bankruptcy. Contact Information: University of Birmingham, Birmingtonham Business School, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, West Midlands, B15 2TY, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. E-mail: p.dimartino@bham.ac.uk