This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian <italic>Knappschaften</italic> (plural of<italic>Knappschaft</italic>), which provided miners with compulsory...

This study uses prices for the German 3 percent imperial loan issued in several tranches since 1890 and still traded during World War I to measure capital market players’ real-time perceptions of the prospects for Germany as the war proceeded. Price data are gathered from the Amsterdam market...

By the mid nineteenth century, German miners relied on their own job-related social insurance scheme providing them with sickness, invalidity and survivorship insurance benefits. Addressing the period from 1867 to 1913, this article investigates whether the mineworkers' insurance funds, the...</italic>