The German government introduced compulsory accident insurance for industrial firms in 1884. This insurance scheme was one of the main pillars of Bismarck’s famous social insurance system. The accident-insurance system achieved only one of its intended goals: it successfully compensated...

Reconstructing the complex supplier network of the famous JU 88 air armament programme, this article shows that outsourcing activities increased considerably in wartime Germany. The resulting inter-firm division of labour did not lead only to a quite effective protection of the German aircraft...

Analysing 474 cases of firms going public in the German capital between 1892 and 1913, we show that innovative firms could rely on the Berlin stock market as a source of financing. The data also reveal that initial public offerings (IPO) of innovative firms were characterized by particularly low...

Which factors caused the growing international competitiveness of German mechanical engineering industry in the pre-World War I period? In this paper, we want to address this question and elucidate whether or not the international market success of machine builders in the German Empire was...

We use a newly developed data set of 39,343 high-value patents granted between 1877 and 1918 to demonstrate that technological progress during German industrialization occurred in at least four different technological waves. We distinguish the railway wave (1877-86), the dye wave (1887-96), the...

Armament minister Albert Speer is usually credited with causing the boom in German armament production after 1941. This paper uses the annual audit reports of the Deutsche Revisions- und Treuhand AG for seven firms which together represented about 50 % of the German aircraft producers. We...

The German population's material standard of living during the 'peace years' of the Nazi regime (1933-38) is much debated. We use hitherto disregarded consumption data and the axiom of revealed preferences to test whether the material standard of living improved. We find that the food...

Today, German machine toolmakers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and imitating German technology. A century ago, German machine toolmakers used the same methods to imitate American technology. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process, we use patent...