Although corporate pyramids are currently commonplace world-wide and although there have been “noteworthy pyramiders” in American business history, this controversial form of corporate organization is now a rarity in the United States. The conventional wisdom is that corporate pyramids disappeared in the U.S. when New Deal policymakers began taxing dividends paid to corporate shareholders. This version of events is more fable than truth. The introduction of the intercorporate dividend tax did not foster a rapid dismantling of corporate pyramids. Instead, pyramidal arrangements were already rare in the U.S., other than in the utilities sector, and the demise of utility pyramids was prompted by the Public Util- ities Holding Company Act of 1935 rather than by tax reform.

Little is known about the logic of lending transactions and the development of credit markets in Mexico, or the rest of Latin America, prior to banks. We know even less about what role financial intermediaries played in these pre-banking markets, or who these intermediaries were. This article analyzes the intermediary role notaries played in the long-term credit market in Yucatan, in southeastern Mexico, in the nineteenth-century. Using a unique dataset of mortgages from the notarial records in the Yucatan state archive, the article shows that, in the absence of banks, notaries facilitated access to credit, and that, in the institutional and political context of Yucatan, both entrepreneurship and monopoly were being fostered.

This article examines how Danish cement factories and building contractors, in particular F. L. Smidth & Co. A/S and its business partner Højgaard & Schultz A/S, used forced and slave labor in Estonia, the Polish General Government, and Serbia as they worked for the German authorities during the Second World War. The article presents new evidence on the use of forced and slave labor inside the European “New Order” and emphasizes the willingness of the companies to expand and engage in morally questionable behavior. The findings illuminate the close connection between political and economic collaboration and contribute to the discussion about the relationship between business and politics during dictatorship, war, and occupation.

In 1910, Louis Brandeis claimed that scientific management could save the railroads a million dollars a day and avoid a rate increase. While Brandeis's claims are well known, historians have neglected the influence of scientific management on the railroads. In 1904, Harrington Emerson introduced repair scheduling techniques in the locomotive shops of the Santa Fe. Scheduling revolutionized repair, and–esponding in part to the regulatory pressures Brandeis helped create–by 1925 most major railroads employed it. In the 1920s, the carriers imported a second new management technique–the “progressive” system that focused on material flows, and introduced batch production techniques to car and locomotive repair. Collectively these methods prevented transportation bottlenecks, raised labor productivity, and reduced capital requirements.

The safety of workers and the costs to employers and the economy as a whole became a serious problem in industrializing nations. Workplace safety in the Ontario manufacturing industry deteriorated at the end of the nineteenth century. In response, the province legislated to regulate safety standards and factory inspection. However, this strategy failed to reduce accident rates. As in the United States, it was the enactment of workers' compensation legislation that generated the economic incentives for Ontario's employers to invest in safety. Yet in contrast to the United States, where safety was predominantly organized inside firms, employers in Ontario developed a comprehensive institutional framework to organize a range of safety actions.