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...

Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British Industrial Revolution in the second third of the nineteenth century. The roots of this industrialisation process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became...

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...

In early 19th century England there was no professional police force and most prosecutions were private. This paper examines how associations for the prosecution of felons arose to internalise the positive externalities produced by private prosecutions. Drawing upon new historical evidence, it...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

In the last two decades of the XIX century Italy became an industrial country. Historians maintain that this process was affected by the action of some interest groups that pursued both state protection from competition and specific public expenditure programs. Starting from the economic...

Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

Our purpose here is to challenge the "big-bang" approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency...