Did the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influence technical change during the Industrial Revolution? We address this question by investigating an instance of state intervention into the market for inventions from 1793-1820: the introduction of a new proviso into British...

The motion picture industry utilizes a varied collection of more or less formal mechanisms for dealing with the collective nature of audiovisual works, ranging from collective bargaining to legal presumptions. What these instances of copyright workarounds have in common is that they are all...

This book explains in fascinating detail how economic and social transformations in pre-1600 Japan led to an industrious revolution in the early modern period, and how the fruits of the Industrious Revolution are what have supported Japan since the eighteenth century, improving living standards...

This book is the first volume of a monograph series published by the Socio-Economic History Society, Japan. The purpose of the series is to make works by Japanese scholars accessible to a wider readership and to increase the knowledge of scholars in this field, particularly in relation to Asia....

From firewood to coal : deforestation and the development of the silk reeling industry in modern Japan / S. Sugiyama and Izumi Yamada -- The government railways and the procurement of railway sleepers in prewar Japan / Asuka Yamaguchi -- The history of ecological environment : ideas derived from...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model which links patenting activity of craft guilds with...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question by exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model that links patenting activity of craft guilds...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model which links patenting activity of craft guilds with...

Copyrights establish intellectual property rights in creative goods ranging from literature and science to images, film, and music. Although their primary purpose is to encourage creativity, systematic evidence on the causal effects of copyrights continues to be scarce, primarily due to a lack...