Journal ArticleDOI
Balancing Permission and Prohibition: Private Trade and Adaptation at the VOC
Stoyan V. Sgourev,Wim Van Lent +1 more
TLDR
This article showed that private-trade regulations, as a historical form of adaptation, occurred as a response to declining performance and exercised a beneficial financial impact, underlining the need of dynamic models to capture complex historical events, illustrating how seeming inactivity may mask inconsistent activity.Abstract:
The first wave of global trade, in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was a key player, writ large the problem of how “principals” could ensure that overseas “agents” protected company interests. The two principal mechanisms were suppression of opportunism and permission of agents to engage in private trade. There is near consensus in past research that the rigidity of the VOC in not permitting private trade left it unable to emulate more nimble rivals and contributed to its demise. Drawing on unique 18th-century archival data, a time-series analysis revises this assumption, showing that private-trade regulations, as a historical form of adaptation, occurred as a response to declining performance and exercised a beneficial financial impact. From the 1740s, control was more flexible than typically asserted, attempting to balance permission and prohibition. If principals recognized the economic upside of private trade, they were apprehensive about its social consequences. The study underlines the need of dynamic models to capture complex historical events, illustrating how seeming inactivity may in fact mask inconsistent activity. It also contributes to better understanding historical transitions when forms of adaptation may prove beneficial in the short run, but are insufficient to prevent decline in the long run.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. By Jan de Vries and, Ad van der Woude. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xx+767. $89.95.
Journal ArticleDOI
Thermal and light stabilities and antioxidant activity of carotenoids from tomatoes extracted using an ultrasound-assisted completely solvent-free method
TL;DR: In this article, an ionic liquid for use in extracting carotenoids from tomatoes with ultrasound assistance was obtained and the stability and antioxidant activity of tomato Carotenoid extracts were determined.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure
TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw on recent progress in the theory of property rights, agency, and finance to develop a theory of ownership structure for the firm, which casts new light on and has implications for a variety of issues in the professional and popular literature.
Book
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
TL;DR: In this article, a social critic of the judgement of taste is presented, and a "vulgar" critic of 'pure' criticiques is proposed to counter this critique.
Journal ArticleDOI
Macroeconomics and reality
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the style in which their builders construct claims for a connection between these models and reality is inappropriate, to the point at which claims for identification in these models cannot be taken seriously.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hypothesis Testing with Efficient Method of Moments Estimation
Whitney K. Newey,Kenneth D. West +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define analogues to the maximum likelihood based Wald, likelihood ratio, Lagrange multiplier, and minimum chi-squared statistics, and prove the mutual asymptotic equivalence of the four in an environment that allows for disturbances that are auto correlated and heteroskedastic.