The great pyramids of America: A revised history of U.S. business groups, corporate ownership, and regulation, 1926–1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research Summary : Control‐magnifying (pyramidal) business groups—multiple tiers of partially‐owned listed affiliates and fully‐owned private affiliates, a dominant organizational form around the world—are virtually absent in America today. Using newly‐assembled historical data, we show that such groups were ubiquitous in the U.S. economy in the 1930s. They came under attack because of their economic and political sway: Some New Deal reforms—proscriptions against public utilities pyramids, intercorporate dividend taxes, and rules governing investment companies—were explicitly aimed at deterring existing groups and preventing new ones from forming. Others, for example, estate taxes and securities law reforms, may have also worked against them. No single reform triggered the immediate dissolution of groups; they broke up under an ongoing anti‐big business sentiment. These events offer lessons for policymakers today. Managerial Summary : Most listed U.S. firms are “standalone”—they do not control, and are not controlled by, other listed firms. Control‐magnifying (pyramidal) business groups—multiple tiers of partially‐owned listed affiliates and fully‐owned private affiliates (e.g., Samsung or Tata)—are ubiquitous around the world but virtually absent in United States. In such groups, the combination of multiple tiers and partial ownership enables control over vast corporate empires. Using newly‐assembled historical data, we show that the U.S. corporate ownership as we know it today is a recent phenomenon: pyramidal groups were common in United States of the 1930s. President Roosevelt, who regarded their economic and political power as excessive, initiated a sequence of reforms which appears to have worn these groups down and probably also kept new ones from forming. JEL CLASSIFICATION : G3, G34, G38, N22.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".