Naomi R Lamoreaux
Biographic Data
| ID | 336846 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naomi R Lamoreaux |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naomi R |
| FAMILY NAME | Lamoreaux |
| SIGNATURE | LAMOREAUX N R |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 150 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Roundtable Review
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 prod…
Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States
When people ask me, as they often do, to recommend a single-volume overview of American economic history, I always feel stumped. Sometimes I suggest textbooks in the field, sadly all out of date at this writing, and sometimes monographs that cover specific periods or topics. Now, finally, I have a good answer. I can recommend Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism . A comprehensive narrative that runs from the colonial period through the rec…
La rupture ? La Grande Guerre, l’Europe et le XXe siècle: Cycle de journées d’études Les Finances, un ministère en guerre, un ministère dans la guerre
La mondialisation économique et financière actuelle est souvent comparée à celle qui se développe au XIXe siècle et culmine en 1914 ; les inégalités retrouvent, dans nombre de pays, leur niveau record de la veille de la Grande Guerre, de même que l’indépendance des banques centrales ou le libéralisme. La Première Guerre mondiale n’a-t-elle donc ouvert qu’une parenthèse dont les effets ont été depuis effacés, et les économies et sociétés européenn…
Voting Trusts and Antitrust: Rethinking the Role of Shareholder Litigation in Public Regulation, from the 1880s to the 1930s
Scholars have long recognized that the states’ authority to charter corporations bolstered their antitrust powers in ways that were not available to the federal government. Our paper contributes to this literature by focusing attention on the relevance for competition policy of lawsuits brought by minority shareholders against their own companies, especially lawsuits challenging voting trusts. Historically judges had been reluctant to intervene i…
Opening the black box of the common-law legal regime: Contrasts in the development of corporate law in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
The general incorporation laws enacted in Britain and the US in the nineteenth century had strikingly different structures. Whereas British law was laissez-faire in spirit, the American statutes were highly regulatory. The literature on the efficiency of the common law might lead one to expect that these statutory differences would become less salient over time, as businesses litigated their disputes and courts in the two countries came to simila…
The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google
This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans' response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we realize that Americans have always been concerned about the political and economic dangers of bigness, not just the threat of high prices. The problem policymakers faced after the rise of Standard Oil was how to pro…
Interchange: Corruption Has a History
Corporations and American Democracy: An Introduction
Corporations and American Democracy
Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.
Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and earl…
Corporate governance and the expansion of the democratic franchise: Beyond cross-country regressions
This article documents the stark differences in the legal regulation of corporations in the United States compared to Britain and other Western European countries in the nineteenth century. The lack of alternative ways of obtaining ‘corporate’ advantages in common-law countries made the corporate form much more politically fraught than in civil-law countries. In the United States, general incorporation laws came after the attainment of universal …
The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interchange: The History of Capitalism
This "Interchange" discussion took place online in late September and early October 2013.As with past interchanges, we encouraged participants to engage in a free-flowing discussion focused on our moderator's questions, their own perspectives and conjectures, and each other's comments.What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted
Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in US History
The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms' R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents…
Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth: Geography, Institutions, and the Knowledge Economy
The Mystery of Property Rights: A U.S. Perspective
Economic development requires both secure property rights and the ability to reallocate property in response to technological and other changes. Significant reallocations have occurred repeatedly throughout U.S. history and have often been involuntary. This essay considers the question of how property rights can be subject to frequent involuntary reallocation and still be considered secure. “Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself dep…
Scylla or Charybdis? Historical Reflections on Two Basic Problems of Corporate Governance
Shareholders in corporations face two very different types of governance problems: expropriation by controlling shareholders or managers; and expropriation by greedy rulers or, more generally, by the state. The problem is that the more successful investors are in protecting their capital from the grabbing hand of the state, the less they are able to call upon the state to protect it from the grabbing hand of corporate insiders. Conversely, the mo…
Pouvoir et propriété dans l'entreprise. Pour une histoire internationale des sociétés à responsabilité limitée
Une longue tradition admet la supériorité de la société anonyme comme forme d'organisation. Une autre, plus récente, estime que les systèmes juridiques anglo-américains donnent aux investisseurs une meilleure protection que les systèmes de droit civil. Cet article remet en cause ces deux idées. Il s'intéresse à l'introduction des sociétés à responsabilité limitée en France, en Allemagne, au Royaume-Uni et aux États-Unis à la fin du XIXe siècle et…
In Memoriam: Ken Sokoloff
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Mobilizing Venture Capital during the Second Industrial Revolution: Cleveland, Ohio, 1870-1920
During the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Midwestern cities were important centers of innovation. Cleveland, the focus of this study, led in the development of a number of key industries, including electric light and power, steel, petroleum, chemicals, and automobiles, and was a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today. In an era when production and invention were increasingl…
Legal Regime and Contractual Flexibility: A Comparison of Business's Organizational Choices in France and the United States during the Era of Industrialization
We compare the law governing business organizational forms in France and the United States during the nineteenth century and find that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the contracting environment in the U.S. was neither freer nor more flexible than in France. U.S. businesses had a more limited menu of organizational choices and also much less ability to adapt the basic forms to meet their needs. Moreover, American law did not evolve any more…
Did Insecure Property Rights Slow Economic Development? Some Lessons from Economic History
Not long ago, a 43-year-old Wonder Bread deliveryman named John Dugger logged on to eBay and, as people sometimes do these days, bought himself a house. Not a shabby one, either. Nine rooms, three stories, rooftop patio, walls of solid stonework—it wasn't quite a castle, but it put to shame the modest redbrick ranch house Dugger came home to every weeknight after a long day stocking the supermarket shelves of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Excellent locat…
Against Whig History
By the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that the grand synthesis laid out by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in The Visible Hand, Scale and Scope , and other writings was badly in need of revision. It was in need of revision because the type of enterprise that Chandler took to be the acme of capitalist economic organization–the large, vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially directed corporation–was clearly in retre…
Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast
Journal Article Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux professor of history and economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 90, Issue 2, September 2003, Pages 437–461, https…
Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History
We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of information and the addressing of problems of informational asymmetries representing central problems for firm-and relationship design. Our analysis emphasiz…
Interchange: The History of Capitalism
This "Interchange" discussion took place online in late September and early October 2013.As with past interchanges, we encouraged participants to engage in a free-flowing discussion focused on our moderator's questions, their own perspectives and conjectures, and each other's comments.What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted
Banks, Kinship, and Economic Development: The New England Case
Early banks in New England functioned not as commercial banks in the modern sense but as the financial arms of extended kinship networks. These groups used banks to raise capital for their diversified enterprises and give their operations a stable institutional base. Because entry into banking was essentially free, favoritism in credit markets—the usual affliction of such a system—seems to have been unimportant. Instead, the economy as a whole be…
Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and earl…
Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States
When people ask me, as they often do, to recommend a single-volume overview of American economic history, I always feel stumped. Sometimes I suggest textbooks in the field, sadly all out of date at this writing, and sometimes monographs that cover specific periods or topics. Now, finally, I have a good answer. I can recommend Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism . A comprehensive narrative that runs from the colonial period through the rec…
Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast
Journal Article Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux professor of history and economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 90, Issue 2, September 2003, Pages 437–461, https…
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
The Mystery of Property Rights: A U.S. Perspective
Economic development requires both secure property rights and the ability to reallocate property in response to technological and other changes. Significant reallocations have occurred repeatedly throughout U.S. history and have often been involuntary. This essay considers the question of how property rights can be subject to frequent involuntary reallocation and still be considered secure. “Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself dep…
Pouvoir et propriété dans l'entreprise. Pour une histoire internationale des sociétés à responsabilité limitée
Une longue tradition admet la supériorité de la société anonyme comme forme d'organisation. Une autre, plus récente, estime que les systèmes juridiques anglo-américains donnent aux investisseurs une meilleure protection que les systèmes de droit civil. Cet article remet en cause ces deux idées. Il s'intéresse à l'introduction des sociétés à responsabilité limitée en France, en Allemagne, au Royaume-Uni et aux États-Unis à la fin du XIXe siècle et…
The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Scylla or Charybdis? Historical Reflections on Two Basic Problems of Corporate Governance
Shareholders in corporations face two very different types of governance problems: expropriation by controlling shareholders or managers; and expropriation by greedy rulers or, more generally, by the state. The problem is that the more successful investors are in protecting their capital from the grabbing hand of the state, the less they are able to call upon the state to protect it from the grabbing hand of corporate insiders. Conversely, the mo…
Against Whig History
By the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that the grand synthesis laid out by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in The Visible Hand, Scale and Scope , and other writings was badly in need of revision. It was in need of revision because the type of enterprise that Chandler took to be the acme of capitalist economic organization–the large, vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially directed corporation–was clearly in retre…
Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in US History
The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms' R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents…
The Geography of Invention in the American Glass Industry, 1870–1925
Geographic clustering in inventive activity has often been attributed to clustering in production. For the glass industiy, we find that despite a general association between location of invention and production, there were significant deviations. Centers of production were not always centers of invention, and some of the most inventive areas, such as southern New England, had very limited production. We hypothesize that the growth of a market for…
Mobilizing Venture Capital during the Second Industrial Revolution: Cleveland, Ohio, 1870-1920
During the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Midwestern cities were important centers of innovation. Cleveland, the focus of this study, led in the development of a number of key industries, including electric light and power, steel, petroleum, chemicals, and automobiles, and was a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today. In an era when production and invention were increasingl…
Vehicles of Privilege or Mobility? Banks in Providence, Rhode Island, during the Age of Jackson
Were banks in the Jacksonian era merely bastions of privilege or were they vehicles of upward mobility for those without capital? The authors attempt to answer these questions by analyzing changes in the wealthholdings of directors of banks in Providence, Rhode Island, during the period 1830 to 1845. They find that bank charters granted in the 1830s did tend to benefit men with relatively little property and that they provided a rising group of e…
The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google
This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans' response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we realize that Americans have always been concerned about the political and economic dangers of bigness, not just the threat of high prices. The problem policymakers faced after the rise of Standard Oil was how to pro…
Interchange: Corruption Has a History
Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making under Uncertainty
How do business leaders make decisions in the face of uncertainty? More important, how do business and economic historians write a narrative that links a business problem, its proposed solution, and the outcome of this action without allowing the success or failure of the decision to determine the trajectory of the story? Counterfactual hypotheses and contextual analysis provide two tools that can help historians minimize the distortions of hinds…
Chandler's Own Economies of Scope
Voting Trusts and Antitrust: Rethinking the Role of Shareholder Litigation in Public Regulation, from the 1880s to the 1930s
Scholars have long recognized that the states’ authority to charter corporations bolstered their antitrust powers in ways that were not available to the federal government. Our paper contributes to this literature by focusing attention on the relevance for competition policy of lawsuits brought by minority shareholders against their own companies, especially lawsuits challenging voting trusts. Historically judges had been reluctant to intervene i…
No Arbitrary Discretion’: Specialisation in Short-Term Commercial Lending by Banks in Late Nineteenth-Century New England
In the late nineteenth century banks in New England embraced an increasingly specialised role in the economy, focusing on the provision of short-term loans to commercial borrowers and eschewing long-term relations with industrial enterprises. This drive to specialise resulted from a particular combination of circumstances: a tremendous expansion in the number of banks, and an equally dramatic rise in deposits as a source of lendable funds. The la…
Bank Mergers in Late Nineteenth-Century New England: The Contingent Nature of Structural Change
Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the g…
Risk and Reward: Venture Capital and the Making of America's Great Industries
Journal Article Risk and Reward: Venture Capital and the Making of America's Great Industries. By Thomas M. Doerflinger and Jack L. Rivkin. (New York: Random House, 1987. xiv +320 pp. $19.95.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 1, June 1988, Pages 320–321, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889793 Published: …
How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World
Journal Article How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. By Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1986. xii + 353 pp. $19.95.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1002–1003, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904062 Published: …
Industrial Organization and Market Behavior: The Great Merger Movement in American Industry
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Portrait Cast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881-1980
Journal Article A Portrait Cast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881–1980. By Mansel G. Blackford. (Westport: Greenwood, 1982. xix + 255 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $29.95.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 70, Issue 2, September 1983, Pa…
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904
Between 1895 and 1904 a great wave of mergers swept through the manufacturing sector of the United States' economy. This book explores the causes of the mergers, arguing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about turn-of-the-century combinations. Despite this conclusion, the author does not accept the view that they were necessarily a threat to competition. She shows that most of these consolidations were less efficient that the new rival…
The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945
Bibliographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders
Journal Article Bibliographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders. By John N. Ingham. (Westport: Greenwood, 1983. Vol. I: A–G. xvii + 522 pp. Notes. Vol. II: H–M. xix + 476 pp. Notes. Vol. III: N–U. xix + 492 pp. Notes. Vol. IV: V–Z. xix + 536 pp. Appendixes, notes, and index. $195.00/the set.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal o…
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
Mergers and the Rise of Big Business
Banks, Kinship, and Economic Development: The New England Case
Early banks in New England functioned not as commercial banks in the modern sense but as the financial arms of extended kinship networks. These groups used banks to raise capital for their diversified enterprises and give their operations a stable institutional base. Because entry into banking was essentially free, favoritism in credit markets—the usual affliction of such a system—seems to have been unimportant. Instead, the economy as a whole be…
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World
Journal Article How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. By Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1986. xii + 353 pp. $19.95.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1002–1003, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904062 Published: …
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
Strictly Business: An Impersonal History of the Morgan Banks
Risk and Reward: Venture Capital and the Making of America's Great Industries
Journal Article Risk and Reward: Venture Capital and the Making of America's Great Industries. By Thomas M. Doerflinger and Jack L. Rivkin. (New York: Random House, 1987. xiv +320 pp. $19.95.) Get access Naomi R. Lamoreaux Naomi R. Lamoreaux Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 1, June 1988, Pages 320–321, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889793 Published: …
Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri
The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics
Chandler's Own Economies of Scope
Vehicles of Privilege or Mobility? Banks in Providence, Rhode Island, during the Age of Jackson
Were banks in the Jacksonian era merely bastions of privilege or were they vehicles of upward mobility for those without capital? The authors attempt to answer these questions by analyzing changes in the wealthholdings of directors of banks in Providence, Rhode Island, during the period 1830 to 1845. They find that bank charters granted in the 1830s did tend to benefit men with relatively little property and that they provided a rising group of e…
No Arbitrary Discretion’: Specialisation in Short-Term Commercial Lending by Banks in Late Nineteenth-Century New England
In the late nineteenth century banks in New England embraced an increasingly specialised role in the economy, focusing on the provision of short-term loans to commercial borrowers and eschewing long-term relations with industrial enterprises. This drive to specialise resulted from a particular combination of circumstances: a tremendous expansion in the number of banks, and an equally dramatic rise in deposits as a source of lendable funds. The la…
Bank Mergers in Late Nineteenth-Century New England: The Contingent Nature of Structural Change
Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the g…
Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy by William Lazonick
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 951 atized personnel structures. Surprisingly, many firms maintained incredibly informal labor policies over long periods. Scale, complexity, corporate form, and labor pressure, especially unionization, were the best predictors of developed personnel policies. Had Licht centered on race or gender, he might have spent more time analyzing the construction and maintenance ofjob segregation patterns, rather than re…
Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy
Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England
The term insider lending conveys an aura of abuse and corruption, of unethical, if not illegal, behaviour. In early nineteenth-century New England, however, insider lending was an integral aspect of the banking system. Not only was the practice an accepted fact of economic life, but, as Naomi R. Lamoreaux argues, it enabled banks (at least in this particular historical context) to play an important role in financing economic development. As the b…
Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England
Journal Article Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England. By Naomi R. Lamoreaux. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xii, 170 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-521-46096-4.) Get access Hugh Rockoff Hugh Rockoff Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 3, December 1995, Pages …
Insider Lending
Political science (36 works) · Business (33 works) · Economics (32 works) · Law (27 works) · History (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (13 works) · Economic Theory and Institutions (12 works)