This paper proposes to exploit a reform in legal rules of corporate governance to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. In particular, we refer to a major shift in the legal and institutional environment, the reform of the German joint-stock...

This paper proposes to exploit a reform in legal rules of corporate governance to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. In particular, we refer to a major shift in the legal and institutional environment, the reform of the German joint-stock...

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...

In this article, we evaluate underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) at the Berlin Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1896. In contrast to modern data, first day returns were extraordinary low and averaged less than five percent, even during the speculative period of the early 1870s....

In this paper, we describe the emergence and evolution of pharmaceutical research at the German company E. Merck during the late 19th and early 20th century. Revolutionary changes in the scientific knowledge base, especially the rise of bacteriological research, and the market entry of dyestuff...

In this article, we investigate the information efficiency of the Berlin stock exchange using returns of a new daily stock-market index for the years 1892–1913. We focus on the impact of the 1896 stock exchange law and of the increases of the stock-market turnover tax in 1894 and 1900 on...

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...

We use a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and performance. We take the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift, and estimate the sensitivity of pay to performance between...