August 29 1997: Netflix was founded in Los Gatos, CA. They mailed DVDs in little red envelopes, with a huge collection of movies and tv shows to choose from. Ten years later, in 2007, Netflix started offering subscribers the option to stream movies online. Sources: 6 Famous Companies That Launched in Summer (so Don’t Take Time Read More …
August 22, 1966: In St. Paul, Minnesota, a small store called Sound of Music opened its doors to customers in late August of 1966. Fifty years later, Best Buy (the company changed its name in 1983) is a multinational retailer with nearly $40 billion in annual revenue. Source: Company Website Read more from the Goizueta Read More …
August 3, 1811: It’s the birthday of Elisha Graves Otis, born 205 years ago in Halifax, Vt. who found his inspiration while working in a Yonkers, N.Y., factory that needed to move heavy equipment to its upper floor. Using a hoist came with the risk of equipment crashing to the ground if the cable broke, so Read More …
July 31, 1912: Milton Friedman is born in Brooklyn, NY. Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics, is best known for his scholarship on the free market economy and monetary policy, namely the quantity theory of money which states that the amount of money in circulation has a direct and proportional relationship to prices. Sources: Milton Friedman: A Read More …
July 20, 1841: On this date, Lewis Tappan founded The Mercantile Agency to collect business information such as sales estimates and bill paying ability. In 1859, the company was sold to Robert Graham Dun and incorporated under a new name, R. G. Dun & Company. And in 1933, Dun & Co. merged with Bradstreet Company, a Read More …
July 17, 1955: On a sunny Anaheim, California Sunday afternoon, Walt Disney opens his first theme park, Disneyland. Offering 5 theme lands with 18 attractions, the park took more than twenty years to plan and cost $17 million to build. Disney’s financial advisers were skeptical of his plan, suggesting that it would be a disaster, but Read More …
July 2, 1962: Sam Walton opens his first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas at the age of 44. Sam Walton was no stranger to retail by this time. He worked for the J.C. Penney Company after college, which at that time was a relatively small retailer. After serving in World War II, where he was captain of Read More …
On June 14, 2014, Lisa D. Cook, Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University, published her paper on the Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940. Through her research she finds that acts of violence caused by political conflict and domestic terrorism negatively affected African American inventor’s Read More …
In this podcast episode of Planet Money from NPR released on June 12, 2020, Lisa D. Cook, Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University, discusses the economic and social implications of racial disparities for Black Americans in the patent industry. She argues the concept of “big theory innovation,” the concept that if the Read More …
The economic and social implications of racial disparities On Monday, June 8, 2020, Lisa Cook, Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University, discussed the economic and social implications of racial disparities in the U.S. at the Bendheim Center of Finance at Princeton University. She focuses specifically on research that examines how violence Read More …
