Between 1974 and 1986, the intervention of various French governments on both the right and the left—in addition to corporate maneuvering and increased focus on competitiveness and lean production—resulted in foreign direct investment, mergers, plant closures, and bankruptcies among struggling French automotive suppliers. This article will explore why these efforts were unsuccessful by revisiting the first Japanese attempts to enter the European automobile industry. It does so not only through the case of Nissan in the United Kingdom in 1984 but also through the essentially unfamiliar and contemporaneous example of French automotive suppliers.

Although some scholars argue that the United States government's procurement policies in World War II resulted in greater industrial concentration, this study indicates that such was not the case in the aircraft industry.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of American states prohibited the establishment of banks of issue within their borders. In theory, these states seemingly opted for the slow economic development associated with an inelastic currency supply. In the case of Iowa, however, the people's demand for an elastic currency was met by the creation of substitute financial institutions — land agency-banks — that functioned as de facto banks of issue.

The processes whereby technical know-how is translated into business decisions are not widely understood; neither is there much definitive information about the role the engineer historically has played in administration. The data upon which this paper is based suggests that management of modern enterprise has been increasingly dependent upon graduates of engineering schools. The facts and implications are of interest not only to historians, but to businessmen and educators.

In his efforts to secure passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, John F. Kennedy had to placate not only oil and coal interests at home, but also traditional trade partners like Venezuela abroad, and he also had to foster the broad national security aim of retaining domestic oil reserves. This article argues that Kennedy was able to utilize a fair trade doctrine to gain enactment of legislation that would both lower trade barriers and assist domestic producers hurt by increased imports.

John Coggan, the first merchant of Boston of whom there is any record, began business in 1634. He thus was presumably well established as a retailer by the time Robert Keayne entered the same type of business a year or two later. Unlike his fellow merchant, who was in 1639 fined heavily by the general court for charging too high a mark-up on certain imported goods, Coggan seems to have abided by Boston's principles of just price, which allowed the retailer to sell at 4 pence on the shilling above the cash cost in England.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rubber tire industry faced debilitating challenges, mostly brought about by changes in the industry's retail structure and exacerbated by the Great Depression. Segments of the industry attempted to use the New Deal's NRA codes to solve these new problems and stabilize the tire market, but the tire manufacturing and tire retailing codes were patent failures. Instead of leading to cartelization and higher prices, which is what most scholars assume the NRA codes did, the tire industry codes actually led to even more fragmentation and price-cutting.