This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1990s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks—and strategy frameworks in general—that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.

This article analyses the pillar of modern central bank governance, i.e. central bank independence, from three perspectives. First, we provide a systematic review of the economics of central bank independence. Second, applying a principal agent model we design a political economy framework, which explains how politicians can shape central bank governance in addressing macroeconomic shocks, while taking into account both the wishes of the citizens and their own personal interests. This framework is then used to interpret the evolution of central bank independence from the Great Inflation (1970s), throughout the Great Moderation (1980s-2000s) and to the Great Recession (2007-14). We provide empirical evidence supporting this evolution using recently developed indices of dynamic central bank independence. Further, our findings stress the importance of macroeconomic shocks in shaping the evolution of central bank independence after the global financial crisis.

Recent advances in historical national accounting have allowed for global comparisons of GDP per capita across space and time. Critics have argued that GDP per capita fails to capture adequately the multi-dimensional nature of welfare, and have developed alternative measures such as the human development index. Whilst recognising that these wider indicators provide an appropriate way of assessing levels of welfare, we argue that GDP per capita remains a more appropriate measure for assessing development potential, focussing on production possibilities and the sustainability of consumption. Twentieth-century Africa and pre-industrial Europe are used to show how such data can guide reciprocal comparisons to provide insights into the process of development on both continents.

This article discusses the use of private promissory notes in the sixteenth-century commercial metropolis of Antwerp. Students of financial history tend to look for first instances of financial techniques and institutions such as bills of exchange, share trading, sovereign debt and banks. However, financial innovation can also be found in the piecemeal adaptation of an older, existing technique, institution or instrument as the result of changes in the market and of demands exerted by particular groups within that economy. The outcome of this process is determined by the structure of the economy in question, its institutional arrangements and the willingness of authorities to adapt the rules.