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...

Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte untersucht die Entwicklung der Wirtschaft in zeitlicher Dimension. Sie ist daher eine Brückendisziplin zwischen den Wirtschaftswissenschaften und der Geschichtswissenschaft. In diesem Lehrbuch wird erstmals für den deutschen Sprachraum versucht, sowohl...

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...