Is It Who You Know? Entrepreneurs and Bankers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This article examines the trust-producing mechanisms investorsand financiers used in São Paulo, Brazil, to determinewhere to invest their money in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. The coffee boom that began in the 1880sspurred bursts of new domestic business development that transformedSão Paulo into Brazil's industrial leader. Using shareholderand director data from an array of business sectors, this articledemonstrates that early development (1856–1905) of theinstitutions that provided business finance was accompaniedby highly personal relationships between financier and entrepreneur.By the early twentieth century (1906–1920), rapid economicgrowth and business diversification rendered these personalconnections inadequate and hence less important to businessfinance. Investors and directors concentrated their energiesand their money, abandoning the practice of forming broad connectionsin general—and connections to a bank in particular—andturned to the stock market instead. By providing an alternativeto personal forms of trust production, the rise of impersonalintermediation promoted the significantly broadened market forcorporate business formation that underwrote São Paulo'seconomic transformation.     

Small is beautiful? The development of women’s activism in a small union

This article draws together two aspects of union renewal strategy: merger and increasing women’s involvement and activism. The article utilises a case study of the National Union of the Lock and Metal Workers (NULMW), a small union that appears to have successfully promoted women’s involvement contrary to the usual expectations about manufacturing union contexts. We argue that the reasons why women have done so well within the NULMW relates to the small size and community‐based nature of the union, including its alignment with the historical development of the lock workforce. In light of this, we reflect on the potential effects of a recent amalgamation of the NULMW with the TGWU.     

Anti-Poverty Programs in Indonesia

Between 1994/95 and 1997/98, Indonesia's spending on anti-poverty programs grew from 0.1% to 0.3% of GDP. The introduction of the 'social safety net' raised anti-poverty spending to 1.4% of GDP in 1998/99 and changed its main focus from job creation schemes, financed mainly by loans and grants to small firms and community groups, to in-kind subsidies for rice, public health care, scholarships for children in poor families and grants to schools in poorareas. The most accurately targeted program was health care, which covered twice as many people in the two poorest deciles as in the remaining eight. For most other programs, this targeting ratio was only about 1.5. We argue that the education and health care programs were the most successful, and doubt that the rice subsidy, job creation and loans schemes were worthwhile.     

威廉姆森商学院：高管需要体验多元文化

中国的快速崛起是美国在21世纪必须面对的最严峻的挑战之一。按照目前的经济增长速度,中国经济可能到本世纪中就能赶上美国。这样可能会导致全     

Measuring the impact of work reorganization on firm performance: evidence from French manufacturing, 1995–1999

In this paper, we apply the method of selective matching to estimate the causal effect of organizational changes on employment, stock of capital, value added, and factor productivity. Derived from a panel of 2404 French manufacturing firms in 1997, our estimates show that work reorganization improves firm performance overall through a more efficient use of labor and capital, without requiring any increase in the factors of production.     

A cross-country comparison of corporate governance and firm performance: Do financial structure and the legal system matter?

We blend the corporate governance and the financial structure/legal system literature streams to study whether firm performance is enhanced when its governance structure embodies the demands of the host country’s financial structure and legal system. Using a sample of 1736 unique firms representing 22 countries, we find that the joint effect of a country’s financial structure and legal system does matter when explaining the relationship between performance and the overall level of corporate governance in a given country. The results also suggest that firms operating in the market/common combination countries tend to command higher market valuations than firms with a comparable level of corporate governance that operate in the bank/civil combination countries.