This article evaluates how the social structure of American legal institutions influenced the diffusion of wrongful-discharge laws over the period 1978-1999, and it assesses whether economic or political variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are surprising and quite striking. Precedents by other courts within the same federal circuit region were generally more influential in the diffusion process than precedents by courts in neighboring states or by courts within the same census or West legal reporting region, even though the precedents were on matters of state law rather than federal law and the decisions were usually made by state courts rather than federal courts. There is some limited evidence that political variables may also have been a factor, but economic variables were not statistically significant, even though the new employment laws may have had important economic consequences.

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cost reduction, oligopoly, technological spillover, welfare, D43, L13,

This paper offers a Schumpeterian view of the Great Merger Movement in the American manufacturing industries, which occurred from 1895 to 1904. From this perspective, the Great Merger Movement was a response to competitive pressures associated with a number of significant technological innovations which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Because the implementation of these innovations required large capital investments, and because the returns to the investments would have been highly uncertain if they had been made competitively, firms at the turn of the twentieth century sought to restrain competition. Since the uncertainty precluded cooperating at arms-length, cooperation was internalized through horizontal consolidations. The consolidations in turn increased the size of the capital investments undertaken to implement the technological innovations. The theory is supported with historical evidence about the technological environment and industrial conditions at the turn of the twentieth century, and an econometric model is tested using data from the Twelfth and Thirteenth Censuses of Manufactures.Great Merger Movement, Technological change, Market power, Schumpeterian hypothesis, Antitrust

No abstract