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...

This article examines the role of ambiguity in processes of institutional change. One challenge for understanding institutional change is to overcome the rather "oversocialized" view of action within Institutional theory. Drawing upon recent work in sociology, the paper introduces a...

Close bank relationships are thought to ameliorate firms' liquidity constraints--a phenomenon frequently measured by liquidity sensitivity of investment. Using a panel of German firms during the formative years of universal banking (1903-1913), this paper shows that, even controlling for...

The Reformation provided a powerful source of legitimacy for secularization of governance and enabled the regional authorities to change the institutional structure to eliminate the inefficiencies under the prevailing (Catholic) regime. We investigate this idea in a simple model of regime change...

Departing from research on Westphalian leases between 1600 and 1900 the paper discusses the lease market of and price determination on three Westphalian estates. While economic history approaches suppose that leases can be seen as market relations and are therefore useful indicators to measure...

This paper examines knowledge spillovers across ethnic boundaries using the case of German immigration to the Russian Empire. We digitize the data on Saratov province in the early 20th century, and find that distance to German colonies predicts the prevalence of heavy iron ploughs, fanning mills...

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 set...

We present the largest homogenous dataset of grain prices for four major types of grain for pre-industrial Germany covering 70 cities with a total of 259 time series. This article describes the sources and the methodology followed to create calendar-year-based price series in grams of silver per...