Several scholars anticipated Ludwig von Mises's calculation argument against socialism. The present paper summarises the contributions by the members of the German Historical School of Economics who preceded Mises and provides several examples of anticipation that have not been discussed in the literature. Furthermore, the paper explains why it is not a coincidence that members of the Historical School claimed as early as the nineteenth century that socialism was unfeasible due to calculation and knowledge problems. In their attempts to understand historically specific features of capitalism, they developed an approach to capital that involved the institutions of private property, money, the market, the enterprise, and monetary calculation. Starting from this institutional approach to capital and capitalism, it was only a small step to the question of what it means for socialist systems that those institutions are lacking.

In his seminal 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Frank Knight distinguished uncertainty and risk. This paper applies Knight's concept of uncertainty to knowledge generated in incumbent organizations to explain the inherent difficulty in assessing potential innovations along with the key role played by knowledge spillover entrepreneurship as a conduit for transforming new knowledge created by an incumbent organization but ultimately commercialized through the creation of a new firm and innovation. Knowledge is inherently uncertain and constitutes what is characterized as the knowledge filter impeding innovative activity in the context of incumbent firms and organizations. The organizational and institutional context and market uncertainty can either facilitate or impede the spillover of knowledge from the firm where it was created to the entrepreneurial startup where it is transformed into innovation. The empirical evidence based on a large, unbalanced panel of 9,126 UK firms constructed from six consecutive waves of a community innovation survey and annual business registry survey during 2002–2014. Implications for managers, scholars, and policymakers are provided.

This paper investigates the views on competition theory and policy of the American institutional economists during the first half of the 20th century. These perspectives contrasted with those of contemporary neoclassical and later mainstream economic approaches. We identify three distinct dimensions to an institutionalist perspective on competition. First, institutionalist approaches focused on describing industry details, so as to bring theory into closer contact with reality. Second, institutionalists emphasized that while competition was sometimes beneficial, it could also be disruptive. Third, institutionalists had a broad view of the objectives of competition policy that extended beyond effects on consumer welfare. Consequently, institutionalists advocated for a wide range of policies to enhance competition, including industrial self-regulation, broad stakeholder representation within corporations, and direct governmental regulations. Their experimental attitude implied that policy would always be evolving, and antitrust enforcement might be only one stage in the development toward a regime of industrial regulation.

The purpose of this symposium is to shed light on the genealogy of the idea of a business corporation, an economic institution which has long been regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Each of the four original contributions addresses the history of some of its key features. In the process, each contributor reveals some of the insights that history has to teach us regarding the central concepts that inform contemporary debates about the nature of the corporation, the contours of the corporation's purpose, the sources of corporate power, the functions of corporate law, the duties of directors, the status of shareholders, and the legitimacy of corporate rights.

The Exchequer bills were a key component in Britain's financial revolution of the 1690s. Using a range of archival sources not examined in previous work, this article argues that closer study of how these bills were given credit and circulation between 1696 and 1698 can offer a more nuanced reading of the mechanisms which helped to create credible commitment in this period. Though proper institutional design did help to give the bills credit, it was only one part of a wider series of informal measures used by the Treasury to secure subscribers for the fund for circulating the bills and to manage the emission of bills to prevent high discounts. This reflects the fact that credit and confidence in this period were influenced by a wide range of factors, including commercial advantage, patriotism and the example offered by other investors, all of which could be manipulated by the Treasury to promote the credibility of the Exchequer bills. Proper institutional and financial incentives were therefore not the only factors which could create credible commitment in Britain's financial revolution.

A previously unknown pricing anomaly existed for a few years in the late 1840s in the British government bond market, in which the larger and more liquid of two very large bonds was underpriced. None of the published mechanisms explains this phenomenon. It may be related to another pricing anomaly that existed for much of the nineteenth century in which terminable annuities were significantly underpriced relative to so-called ‘perpetual’ annuities that dominated the government bond market. The reasons for these mispricings seem to lie in the early Victorian culture, since the basic economic incentives as well as laws and institutions were essentially the familiar modern ones. This provides new perspectives on the origins and nature of modern corporate capitalism.

British government bonds formed the deepest, most liquid and most transparent financial market of the nineteenth century. This article shows that those bonds had long periods, extending over decades, of anomalous behavior, in which Consols, the largest and best known of these instruments, were noticeably overpriced relative to equivalent securities which offered the same interest rate and the same guarantee of payment. This finding and similar ones for other comparable pairs of British gilts appear to provide the most extreme counterexamples documented so far to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and to the Law of One Price, and point the way to further investigations on the origins and nature of the modern economy.

The collapse of the ambitious and experimental Ayr Bank (Douglas, Heron & Co.) was the central episode of the 1772–3 British credit crisis and served as a direct influence on Adam Smith's monetary analysis in the Wealth of Nations. This article identifies the issuance of redeemable annuities in response to the bank's stop of payments in June 1772 and the distressed nature of its asset liquidations afterwards as the main reasons behind the size of its losses. It furthermore uses primary manuscript evidence to reconstruct and extend the existing narrative of this famous episode, from the planning stages in 1773 while the bank was still fighting for its survival, to the retirement of its banknotes by the Edinburgh public banks in 1773–4, the legal and political manoeuvring behind the redemption of the annuities by Act of Parliament in 1774, and the over 40 years of asset unwinding that followed.

While ocean current and winds certainly play a major role in guiding the trajectories of free-floating icebergs, the direct effect of atmospheric surface pressure gradients can also have an important influence on the trajectories of large icebergs whose horizontal dimensions are sufficiently great to span synoptic systems. This effect is examined as a way of understanding why icebergs B15A, B15J, B15K, and C16 became “trapped” in a limited region immediately north of Ross Island for a period of several years, without being grounded. This limited region is otherwise flushed annually by summer surface winds and currents; thus the delay of the northward drift of the large icebergs (particularly B15A and B15J) defied expectation. The best explanation for this unexpected iceberg behaviour is that the large volcanic massifs on Ross Island create a quasi-permanent surface pressure anomaly patterned as a dipole, with high pressure in the area upwind of the island (an area appropriately called Windless Bight), and low pressure in the downwind area of the iceberg parking lot. The surface pressure regime experienced by two icebergs B15A and B15K is estimated using Automatic Weather Station observations and Global Positioning System receivers deployed on their surfaces to explain why they remained trapped. Breakdown of the atmospheric pressure gradients allowed them to eventually escape from the region to the north-west.