Christopher Grandy

New Jersey Corporate Chartermongering, 1875–1929

New Jersey played a dominant role in the merger wave at the turn of the century. The state facilitated the rise of large firms by liberalizing its corporation law in exchange for incorporation fees and franchise taxes. This article suggests that chartermongering emerged from the U.S. federal political system and the economic structure of the state. Delaware became the preferred state of incorporation as New Jerseys economic structure changed.

Original Intent and the Sherman Antitrust Act: A Re-examination of the Consumer-Welfare Hypothesis

An important tenet of the Chicago School of antitrust asserts that the Sherman Acts framers sought to foster consumer welfare. This article challenges that interpretation by re-examining the legislative history. That history suggests that a consumer-welfare standard did not survive the legislative process and that, if anything, Congress focused on the behavior of producers.

Financial Integration in Antebellum America: Strengthening Bodenhorn's Results

Howard Bodenhorn has argued that U.S. financial markets prior to the Civil War were integrated. This finding challenges some of the conventional wisdom about the history of U.S. capital markets. A re-examination of Bodenhorns work reveals flaws in his methodology that casts doubt on his results. Yet after addressing these weaknesses and offering an alternative analysis of his data, we find that Bodenhorns essential result is confirmed: capital markets do appear integrated in the antebellum period.

The Principle of Maximum Entropy and the Difference between Risk and Uncertainty

This paper makes endogenous the probability assignment of an economic agent in a familiar two-period finance model by basing the probability assignment upon available information. The Principle of Maximum Entropy (PME) reduces an economic decision made under uncertainty to a decision made under risk. The PME accomplishes this because the necessary conditions for a probability distribution to achieve maximum entropy, given certain information, are equivalent to the conditions characterizing a distribution for which the information forms a sufficient statistic of fixed dimension.