This article revisits and reassesses the evolution of Italian capitalism during the so called “economic miracle” (1950–1973). Using original sources, it analyzes how the average small, private firm, representing the vast majority of Italian businesses at the time, strug...

This article examines the relationship between patents, appropriability strategies, and market for technology in the English brewing industry before 1850. Previous research has pointed to the apparent paradox that large-scale brewing in this period showed both a self-aw...

My brief comments have the following goals: to characterize the Chandlerian model with reference to the theme of "globalization"; to take into consideration some criticisms of that model, criticisms that emphasize its inapplicability to particular national cases (especi...

Based on Italian and foreign archival sources, this study shows how Italy's active assistance to its industrial apparatus soon included the newly born aircraft industry, including the Caproni Group. However, after World War II the Group went bankrupt along with most air...

The entrepreneurial activity of Enrico Mattei, who headed the Italian state oil company AGIP (later ENI) from 1945 to 1962, laid the groundwork for the company's growth during the 1950s and 1960s. Mattei relied on a group of knowledgeable specialists, who were equipped ...

Using newly collected patent assignment data for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and a standard econometric approach from the international trade literature—the gravity model—we demonstrate the existence of border effects on a historical technology ...

This article describes the features of the international mercury market during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyzes the various market agreements made, their effectiveness, and their consequences. The period studied is little understood, although it was ...