The article investigates a sample of 180 technology licensing contracts closed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering companies between 1880 and 1913. The empirical results suggest that strategic behaviour is relevant for the design of licensing contracts, whereas...

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...

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 researchers employed by German chemical and electrical engineering firms at the turn of the 20th century and...

We investigate a sample of 180 technology licensing contracts closed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering companies between 1880 and 1913. Our empirical results suggest that strategic behaviour seems to be relevant for the design of licensing contracts, whereas inventor...

We investigate the wealth effects of takeovers in the mining industry of the German Ruhr district between 1896 and 1913. We employ event study methodology and use a new data set that covers stock prices of joint-stock mining companies and information on share prices of Gewerkschaften, an...

We examine the effect of one of the presumably most powerful cartels ever on the profitability of its members. More precisely, we consider the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, a coal cartel that operated in Imperial Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, using a newly constructed...

Germany's historical national accounts are controversially discussed in a series of recent papers by Fremdling and Stäglin (2004, 2005), Ritschl (2004) and Burhop and Wolff (2005). The growth of the German economy during the nineteenth century, the level of economic development reached in 1913...

The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...