Recent Posts

This Day in Business History: Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman!

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 …

This Day in Business History: The Mercantile Agency (later D&B) is Founded

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 …

This Day in Business History: Opening Day at Disneyland

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 …

This Day in Business History: Lisa D. Cook Publishes Her Paper on Violence and Economic Activity

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 …

This Day in Business History: The Podcast Planet Money Releases Lisa D. Cook’s Patent Racism Episode

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 …

This Day in Business History: Lisa D. Cook Presents on the Economic and Social Implications of Racial Disparities

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 …

This Day in Business History: Napster Initiates Ripple of Disruption in the Music Industry

June 1, 1999: The world’s first peer-to-peer music sharing site, Napster, launched on this date. Before Napster, music lovers were limited to purchasing music as hard copies on CDs, vinyl, or cassettes. Napster enabled users to share music files in MP3 format, initiating a massive disruption in the music industry. Within just a year of Read More …