Money for nothing: How firms have financed R&D-projects since the Industrial Revolution
回顾了自工业革命以来研发支出的长期历史模式，发现尽管存在沉没成本、不确定性等融资障碍，研发支出仍远超GDP增长，并分析了企业克服这些障碍的组织形式和制度工具。
We investigate the long-run historical pattern of R&D-outlays by reviewing aggregate growth rates and historical cases of particular R&D projects, following the historical-institutional approach of Chandler (1962), North (1981) and Williamson (1985). We find that even the earliest R&D-projects used non-insignificant cash outlays and that until the 1970s aggregate R&D outlays grew far faster than GDP, despite five well-known challenges that implied that R&D could only be financed with cash, for which no perfect market existed: the presence of sunk costs, real uncertainty, long time lags, adverse selection, and moral hazard. We then review a wide variety of organisational forms and institutional instruments that firms historically have used to overcome these financing obstacles, and without which the enormous growth of R&D outlays since the nineteenth century would not have been possible.