In this paper, we describe the emergence and evolution of pharmaceutical research at the German company E. Merck during the late 19th and early 20th century. Revolutionary changes in the scientific knowledge base, especially the rise of bacteriological research, and the market entry of dyestuff...

This paper proposes to exploit a reform in legal rules of corporate governance to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. In particular, we refer to a major shift in the legal and institutional environment, the reform of the German joint-stock...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data...

The allocation of intellectual property rights between firms and employed researchers causes a principal-agent problem between the two parties. We investigate the working contracts of inventors employed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering firms at the turn of the 20th...

In this article, we evaluate underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) at the Berlin Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1896. In contrast to modern data, first day returns were extraordinary low and averaged less than five percent, even during the speculative period of the early 1870s....

We examine the effect of one of the presumably most powerful cartels ever on the profitability of its members. More precisely, we consider the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, a coal cartel that operated in Imperial Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, using a newly constructed...

Throughout the period 1871-1938, the average British worker was better off than the average German worker, but there were significant differences between major sectors. For the aggregate economy, the real wage gap was about the same as the labour productivity gap, but again there were important...

In 1878 the liberal parties lost enough votes to loose the majority in the parliament which they had defended in the general election just one year before. In this paper, the question of where the voters came from and why the voting changed so crucially within one year are re-examined. The...

We estimate effective spreads and round-trip transaction costs at the Berlin Stock Exchange for the period 1892-1913 using daily stock market returns for a sample of 27 stocks. Our results show that transaction costs at the main stock exchange in a bank-based financial system at the turn of the...

We investigate a sample of 180 technology licensing contracts closed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering companies between 1880 and 1913. A regression analysis shows that licensing contracts closed before a patent was granted and contracts closed between firms and...