In many countries holders of patents must pay an annual renewal fee in order to keep their patents in force. This paper uses data on the proportion of patents renewed, and the renewal fees faced by, post World War II cohorts of patents in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, in conjunction...

This paper introduces a new internationally comparable data set that permits an empirical investigation of the effects of patent law on innovation. The data have been constructed from the catalogues of two 19th century world fairs: the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, 1851, and the...

Casual observation indicates that in recent years real interest rates in the United States appear to have risen sharply and have remained high relative to historical standards. Many observers have claimed that these high real rates have been transmitted abroad and have lead to high real rates in...

Economic and social historians have traditionally been concerned to measure changes in the income and welfare of populations in the past.Until recently, however, they have not recognized that anthropometric data, such as evidence on the average height achieved by a population at a particular...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...