Germany, France and, up to a point, the United States brought in quotas to raise the share of women in leadership. Did they work?
By Raphael Bauer30 min read
Four of the 40 companies in Germany’s DAX are run by a woman. Four of the 40 in France’s CAC 40. In the United States, 48 of the 500 in the S&P 500. Three countries, three different approaches to the question, and much the same answer: about one company in ten.
At 21 Ronald Coase asked why firms exist at all if prices organise an economy, and answered that using the market has a cost. The paper he published in 1937, at 26, lay largely unused for a generation and has since been cited more than 15,000 times. Set against its critics and against several hundred statistical tests, the question has held up better than the answer. The forecast often made in its name, that cheap communication would dissolve the firm, was never his.
By Raphael Bauer37 min read
On 10 October 1932 a 21-year-old lecturer in Dundee wrote to Ronald Fowler about the first lecture of a course he had just begun. “As it was a new approach (I think) to this subject, I was quite pleased with myself,” he …
Germany's governments promise business less bureaucracy. On 1 October Potsdam began taxing coffee cups, pizza boxes and forks. The statute is three pages long; the city's guide to applying it has eighteen sections, three other cities read the same tax differently, and Potsdam did not check how much of its rubbish is take-away packaging. The one study with a control group found the bins no lighter.
By Raphael Bauer36 min read
In Potsdam the length of a disposable fork is now a tax question. Since Thursday the city has charged 20 cents on every piece or set of disposable cutlery handed out with food. Section 2 of its official guide says the charge applies to …
Berlin froze its rents in 2020, and in the weeks that followed the number of flats advertised fell by more than half. Catalonia capped its rents the same year, and researchers found no sign that supply shrank. Stockholm has held rents down since the war, and the average wait for a flat there is now nine years. The evidence says rent control works as designed, for the people it was designed for, and sends the bill to everyone who has not arrived yet.
By Raphael Bauer36 min read
The average tenant who got the keys to a rent-controlled flat in Stockholm last year had waited nine years for it. For a flat in the inner city the wait was twenty-one years. Nobody set out to build that. Sweden set out to build a system in …
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