Volume 10, No. 4 (Winter 2007)
Fritz Machlup distinguished himself in several main areas, including industrial organization, with particular emphasis on the production and distribution of knowledge, and international monetary economics. However, his role as methodologist concerns us here. As the long-term mentor of Edith Penrose, whose M.A. and Ph.D. he supervised at Johns Hopkins from 1947–1951, and whose work on The Theory of the Growth of the Firm he co-directed, Machlup as methodologist was in the position to influence the structure of her thinking and modeling of the process theory of the growth of firms. Did he do so and how did he do so? These questions are the focus of this paper.
