Representative Firm Analysis and the Character of Competition: Glimpses from the Great Depression
探讨经济学家如何从商业史中汲取养分，提出两种方法：一是用经济学问题审视历史档案，二是用历史视角分析常规经济数据，并以大萧条为例展示后者的价值。
Business history is terra incognita to most economists. They may have encountered the works of Alfred Chandler, most notably his magisterial Visible Hand. But they may well have taken away from its massive bulk little more than a sense of the inevitable coming of giant, divisionalized enterprise with a corporate planning staff devoted to measurement and planning. This is a vision congenial to the way we teach undergraduates about how firms work. But it is far from the most nourishing food for thought that Chandler's book offers, and it does not reveal much about method. More likely, and certainly worse, economists may have encountered company histories -traditional business histories in airport bookstores or used book shops. This genre will probably have been positively off-putting. The typical example contains much admiring prose, not much analysis, very little comparison, and practically no explicit theorizing. The best works provide provocative food for thought; but most will suggest to economists that business history is a subject better suited to the Department of Public Relations than to the Department of Economics. Much more fruitful encounters are possible. Businesses are basic units in the markets economists study. The internal organization of firms has a history, and actual competition between firms has a history that is at least as complex and rich. In both of these and in related areas, the history of business has a great deal of stimulus to offer economists and even economic historians. One approach to such encounters involves addressing the archival materials worked by historians but with economist questions. The categories and principles that organize such collections are very far from the ones graduate training in economics suggests, and there are considerable gains from trade to be had simply by raising questions. A number of interesting (and eminently teachable) examples of this approach can be found in the NBER economic business history conference volumes (Peter Temin [ed.], 1991; Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Raff [eds.], 1995; Naomi R. Lamoreaux et al. [eds.], 1998). In terms of the title of this session, this type of work represents finding the microeconomics we know to be useful in the history of business. A second and different approach, to be sketched in this paper, involves addressing more conventional economist data with questions raised by archival and other contemporary sources. This approach has several virtues: it is less of an intellectual stretch for working economists; it can often be carried out with materials that can be found in university libraries; and it actually offers the promise of extracting useful microeconomics and empirical research programs from business history, rather than simply reading microeconomics, textbook version or otherwise, into the history. t Discussants: Bengt Holmstrom, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sidney Winter, University of Pennsylvania.