‘‘Old taxes are good taxes’’ might have been theconviction of the German lawmakers that supportedthe German trade tax. The survival of this tax wasanything but certain, because in late 2005 measureshad already been taken for the tax’s farewell ceremony.Newspaper stories announced the...

Recent research on international productivity comparisons has focused on the discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. For a 1907 benchmark, Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop (2007) find German manufacturing to be only slightly ahead of...

This paper investigates the role of consumption in the emergence of the motion picture industry in Britain France and the US. A time-lag of at least twelve years between the invention of cinema and the film industry’s take-off suggests that the latter was not mainly technology-driven. In all...

La Rochelle, the fourth largest slaving port in France in the eighteenth-century, is used as a case study in the application of agency theory to long-distance trade. This analysis explores an area not accounted for in the literature on French commercial practices. Being broadly couched in a New...

This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier model to investigate the efficiency of Britain’s private railways during the period 1893-1912. We find that there was substantial inefficiency in the industry with no sign of reduction over time. Our main conclusion is that principal agent problems...

This paper explores the location of industry in pre-World-War-I Britain using a model that takes account both of factor endowment and also of new economic geography influences. Broadly speaking, the pattern of industrial location in this period was quite persistent and regional specialization...

Das deutsche Steuerrecht gewährt den Landwirten durch die Abgrenzung der Einkünfte aus Land- und Forstwirtschaft von den übrigen sechs Einkunftsarten steuerliche Vergünstigungen. Als Abgrenzungskriterium zwischen landwirtschaftlicher und gewerblicher Tierhaltung dient das Verhältnis aus der...

This paper discusses the impact of the international transfer of embodiedtechnological change on the employment evolution of skills in a sample of low andmiddle income countries (LMICs). A large body of literature has already underlinedthe occurrence of widening wage and employment differentials...

Im Mai 2006 ist die "Richtlinie zu Endenergieeffizienz und zu Energiedienstleistungen"(kurz: EDR) in Kraft getreten. Diese verpflichtetdie Bundesregierung, einen "Energieeffizienz-Aktionsplan“(kurz: EEAP) vorzulegen. Für dieses politische Vorhaben werdensystematisch identifizierte und...

[...]In this article, we demonstrate how such industry-specific realexchange rates can be constructed and present the recent pathsof these indexes. We next present three basic real exchange ratemeasures for each industry: one using export partner weightsonly, a second using import partner...