Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

This paper presents empirical evidence of the international integration of Swedish economic historians. Contrary to the claims of a recent national evaluation of the discipline, the Swedish shares of international publications and conference presentations are robustly below available...

A year after I started this project under the auspices of the Flynn Grant from Georgetown University's Center for German and European Studies it is finally finished, and only then because of the invaluable assistance of numerous kind individuals. In Cologne, Germany, the Institut für...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...

The very low interest rates and inflation rates of recent years has generated renewed interest in alternative policies that would not leave central banks trapped by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Amongst this debate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the possibility...

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...

Since the election of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia in 2000 Rosneft has become one of the cornerstones of the strategy for the Russian state to retake control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, and in particular the energy sector. However, having now established itself as...

The Munich Re was founded in 1880 and is from the very start till this day one of the leading insurance companies in the world. Despite its long and successfull existance the company’s history has not been reported yet in a way that fulfilled scientific criteria. This paper can be seen as a...

Die Determinanten von Überleben oder Sterben, von Expansion oder Kontraktion von Unternehmen sind ein wichtiges Forschungsgebiet der Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Zwar bietet die mikroökonomische Theorie eine Reihe von fundierten Verhaltenshypothesen, z.B. die der Betriebseinstellung, wenn das...