Abstract Based on two newly compiled patent databases, we investigate the role of female inventors in two authoritarian regimes: Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We find that the women inventor rate (WIR) was very low under the Nazi regime. Based on the sample of patents used in this article, we estimate that female inventors accounted for less than 2 percent of all patents in this period. This figure reflects the low WIR in previous periods but may be also driven by various policy measures of the Nazi regime. In the GDR, the WIR was even lower in the 1950s, but it increased to about 19 percent in the 1980s. A plausible reason for this development is the GDR’s women’s policy, which, among other things, tried to integrate women into universities and R&D departments of state-owned enterprises, thus promoting female inventorship.
Abstract In the interwar period, many industrializing states raised labor standards, introduced worker protections, and established deliberative labor institutions. Iran stands out as a remarkable outlier in this early wave of labor policy. Despite founding membership in the International Labour Organization (ILO), Iran kept labor protections at a bare minimum and workers excluded from decision-making processes altogether. This article proposes that Iranian participation in the ILO itself helped to produce this exclusionary approach to labor. Drawing on original archival sources, I show that Iran was early on positioned within the ILO as a paradigmatic case of “Eastern” underdevelopment − a categorization that legitimated broad exemptions from international labor standards. Iran’s founder’s discount was not simply guaranteed by major powers or ILO flexibility provisions; it was actively appropriated, internalized, and reproduced by Pahlavi state elites. More broadly, the case illustrates how concessions granted during an international organization’s founding period can become durable imprints on member states, locking in practices that run counter to the organization’s own mandate.
Abstract This article considers the impact of occupation on mortality using a dataset of over 9,000 male postal workers who can be traced from retirement to death. For each worker, we know their demographic characteristics, occupation, location, and cause of retirement. The article uses these data to model the impact of postal work on survival post-retirement, showing that type of occupation and cause of retirement had significant effects on survival for those pensioners who retired for medical reasons. Different occupations were exposed to varying risks, which led to occupationally distinct patterns of medical causes of retirement. These differing causes of retirement, in turn, led to different survival chances after a worker retired. The article demonstrates how a long-term view can improve our understanding of adult mortality in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This article examines the history of randomized experiments in social policy evaluation research, focusing on an early wave of influential "social experiments" pertaining to the welfare reform debates of the 1980s. Existing literature does not account for the sudden rise of this methodology in policy contexts that had previously been considered too complex for conducting randomized experiments. I argue that the early proliferation of social policy experiments involved the enterprising efforts of a new policy research contractor that adapted this methodology in response to changing market demands and a new political context. Using archived research reports, memoirs of organizational leaders, and a survey of methodological literature, I document a subtle shift in the scientific norms and practices of evaluation researchers to illustrate how a politically unaligned body of expertise filled a niche in service of conservative welfare reform. This historical account offers a unique case study of the relationship between expertise and political change, and it locates the rise of randomized trials within broader critiques of economistic approaches to social policy research that ascended after the 1960s.
Corporate patents have had a significant influence on economic growth. This study analyzes Japanese corporate patents in the electrical sector, from a microscopic, business-history perspective, to clarify the implications of their growth for technology transfer, technological development, the organization of patent management, the formation of a national system of innovation, and the growth of individual inventors. An analysis of the inventors behind corporate patents revealed that international technology transfer and R&D policies underpin an increase in corporate patents. Japanese companies partnering with foreign companies actively combined technology introduction with technological development, making significant contributions to the industry's technological progress. Companies without foreign partnerships expanded their organized R&D under indirect stimuli within the broader industry-wide technology introduction and R&D movement. The expansion of corporate patents also strengthened the link between technology introduction and development in major firms through the formation of patent departments within each company. This further influences the formation of a national innovation system centered on large corporations and the promotion of R&D across the entire electrical machinery industry. Furthermore, increasing the specifications of foreign companies' and foreign-affiliated Japanese companies' patents provided a much greater opportunity with independent inventors.
