The MaschinenBauIndustrie Knowledge Graph (MBI-KG) is a structured and semantically enriched dataset extracted from the 1937 publication “Die Maschinen-Industrie im Deutschen Reich” (The Machinery Industry in the German Reich), published by the “Wirtschaftsgruppe Maschinenbau” and edited by Herbert Patschan. This historical source offers data on German companies within the mechanical engineering industry during the pre-World War II era.The book was digitized, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was applied to extract text. The unstructured extracted data was then structured and semantically enriched to enable data integration and reuse. The semantically enriched data was uploaded into an open-source knowledge-graph software. The resulting knowledge graph includes detailed information about companies, individuals, and administrative entities relevant to the German mechanical engineering industry. The data is accessible through various means, including a SPARQL endpoint, an API, advanced search functionalities, a reconciliation API, and bulk files. Each entity in the knowledge graph can be exported in multiple formats, such as CSV, RDF (ttl), JSON, and NDJSON, ensuring compatibility with diverse research tools and platforms.This dataset can be reused in various research domains, including economic history, data science, and digital humanities. By providing machine-readable, structured data from a crucial historical period, the MBI-KG facilitates novel analyses and insights into the economic and industrial landscape of early 20th-century Germany. The dataset's interoperability with other data sources and its alignment with FAIR principles further enhance its value for interdisciplinary research and long-term preservation

We leverage multimodal large language models (LLMs) to construct a dataset of 306,070 German patents (1877-1918) from 9,562 archival image scans using our LLM-based pipeline powered by Gemini-2.5-Pro and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Lite. Our benchmarking exercise provides tentative evidence that multimodal LLMs can create higher quality datasets than our research assistants, while also being more than 795 times faster and 205 times cheaper in constructing the patent dataset from our image corpus. About 20 to 50 patent entries are embedded on each page, arranged in a double-column format and printed in Gothic and Roman fonts. The font and layout complexity of our primary source material suggests to us that multimodal LLMs are a paradigm shift in how datasets are constructed in economic history. We open-source our benchmarking and patent datasets as well as our LLM-based data pipeline, which can be easily adapted to other image corpora using LLM-assisted coding tools, lowering the barriers for less technical researchers. Finally, we explain the economics of deploying LLMs for historical dataset construction and conclude by speculating on the potential implications for the field of economic history.

In the second half of the 19th century, Germany developed into one of the most innovative economies in the world and was able to defend this position in the 20th century. In order to investigate the causes of this inventiveness, it is necessary to quantify innovations and assign them to inventors, regions and industries. For this reason, various historical patent databases have been set up over the last two decades, currently covering the period from 1815 to 1990. We present these patent databases and give an overview of the main empirical studies based on these statistics.

We provide an empirical analysis of patent litigation in the German Empire by using a new data set that includes detailed information on patent proceedings. Our data combine micro-level information on nullification decisions by the Imperial Patent Office and the court of appeal, the Imperial Court, with data on high-value patents. By using nullification decisions as a proxy for patent conflicts, we analyze the differences in the intensity of patent conflicts across industries. Our results reveal a significant heterogeneity. By introducing the new concept of technological concentration, we show that in industries with high technological concentration patent litigation was less frequent. We argue that, unlike small and medium-sized enterprises, innovative companies with market power had the option of resolving patent disputes outside the courts through cartel-like agreements such as patent pools.

The division of Germany into a free-market West and a socialist East that followed the military defeat in spring 1945 induced thousands of East German companies to relocate to the West in the following years. This exogenous mass exodus allows us to identify the motives for the choice of firm location in a natural experiment. We test whether the East German firms were primarily attracted by existing West German agglomeration economies or rather sought new locations geographically close to their original homes, which allowed them to retain their access to pre-existing local networks. To test the determinants of the firms’ location choices, we use a newly constructed data set including information for over 4,200 relocated Eastern German firms, which we combine with county-level data on local economic activity and other socio-economic characteristics. By applying a mixed logit choice model, we find a negative effect of distance. Firms preferred places close to their original locations with market conditions they already knew. The fact that this negative distance effect is stronger for firms from original places close to the inner-German border strengthens our hypothesis that “home advantages” mattered. We also provide evidence for the attractiveness of agglomerations showing that firms favored places with high productivity and market potential. There are heterogeneous effects across industries: For companies in global market-oriented industries, the agglomeration effect is stronger and the location advantage smaller than for companies in industries with a more local customer or supplier base.

Germany was the first Western industrialised country that comprehensively protected its people against the existential risks of illness, invalidity, old age, and death. This chapter discusses whether the introduction of social insurance promoted social and economic progress in the German Empire. In eighteenth-century Prussia, the miners’ collective security system developed parallel to the rise of the local mining industry. The new invalidity and old-age insurance spent a larger proportion of its revenue, which was contributed in equal parts by employers and employees, for invalidity pensions intended to maintain a worker’s remaining working capacity. In the nineteenth century, most people still relied primarily on their own families to protect themselves against the elementary risks of life. The Imperial Insurance Office, the responsible regulatory authority, finally succeeded in convincing the employers’ liability insurance associations to differentiate the risk figures they assigned to the companies.

Our microeconomic study of the savings behavior of 2,500 German savers in the second half of the 19th century allows us to explore the causes of individual savings decisions in an emerging economy. Inferring savers' inflation expectations from the personal inflation experiences they made we confirm the standard interpretation of the Euler equation: The savers of our sample reduced their savings with an increase in this proxy for inflation expectation. Beyond this result, our study provides three additional insights. First, we observe a non-linear relationship between inflation experience and savings, implying that savers responded only to exceptionally high inflation (and deflation) experiences ignoring smaller fluctuations in this measure. Second, we find that savers also reacted to high deflation experiences with reducing their savings. This surprising behavior becomes reasonable when we consider that, in the second half of the 19th century, the globalization-driven decline in consumer prices was associated with an increase in nominal wages. Third, we show that it was mainly long-time female savers with above-average savings balances who adjusted their savings to changing inflation experiences.

Reviewed by: Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy by B. Zorina Khan Jochen Streb (bio) Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy By B. Zorina Khan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 462. Economic historians have often delved into the causes of the Industrial Revolution in Europe with this question: "Why Britain?" In this book, B. Zorina Khan, one of the world's leading experts on the history of innovation, proposes a new direction for the debate. With the question "Why America?" she asks to clarify how the United States succeeded in overtaking Europe in the nineteenth century to become the global technology leader of the twentieth century; in the author's view, "the greatest divergence in history" (p. 398). Khan is an opinionated author with great faith in the efficiency of free-market institutions. Her clear answer to the question of American ascendance is therefore not surprising. In Europe elites ensured that patents and innovation prizes were distributed primarily among their peers, while American technology policy, with the help of its democratic patent system, was designed from the outset to activate the creativity of broad sections of the population. To justify this hypothesis, Khan undertakes a two-step line of reasoning. In a first step, she shows that encouraging innovation by awarding prizes is inferior to granting patents. In the second step, she tries to convince readers that the U.S. patent system was superior to European patent systems. Khan uses extensive data on individual inventors, patents, and innovation awards, compiled over her lifetime of research. Because she eschews sophisticated econometric studies in this book, which can be found in her more technical articles, her explanations are well understandable to readers who do not have advanced knowledge of statistics. Europe is represented throughout by Britain and France. She neglects recent research on Germany, Italy, or Scandinavia, as found, for example, in the volume "Patent Law and Innovation in Europe during the Industrial Revolution" of the Economic History Yearbook. Using the examples of the British Royal Society of Arts and similar organizations "by elites and for elites" in France and the United States, Khan examines the allocation of innovation prizes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 176). She finds that innovation prize competitions were "markets for lemons" to which inventors mostly submitted inventions that they did not expect to generate profits in the real marketplace. In general, Khan notes an "essential inability of bureaucrats to replicate the market mechanism" (p. 173). Khan's comparison of patent systems is based on the insight that the effects of a patent law depend very much on the legal details. Khan emphasizes the low patent fees in the American patent law, which made it possible for inventors from the working class, including women, to acquire [End Page 252] patents, unlike in Europe. This difference was based on different legal concepts. While in the United States it was believed that an inventor was entitled to legal ownership of his or her idea, in Europe patents were traditionally seen more as a privilege granted by the authority. Khan points out that by the end of the nineteenth century, many European countries reformed their patent laws in light of American success and adapted them to the American model. Surprisingly, she leaves unanswered the question of why this convergence came too late to make any difference to the technological dominance of the United States in the twentieth century. The German example, which Khan largely ignores, raises additional doubts about the general validity of her hypotheses. Despite high patent fees, German inventors excelled after 1877 with many patents and great economic success in the high-tech industries of the Second Industrial Revolution, namely chemistry and electrical engineering. Khan criticizes dissenting views of other scientists with the same vigor that she argues her own. For example, she rejects Petra Moser's approach of using world exhibition data to learn more about the effectiveness of patent laws. She also repudiates the notion that during the first Industrial Revolution innovations were brought about in particular by elites with "upper-tail knowledge," as argued, for example, by Mara Squicciarini and Nico Voigtländer in "Human Capital and Industrialization...

Gert Kollmer-von Oheimb-Loup / Sibylle Lehmann / Jochen Streb (Hg.), Chancen und Risiken internationaler Integration, Mikro- und makroökonomische Folgen der Internationalisierung (Stuttgarter Historische Studien zur Landes- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 22), Ostfildern: Thorbecke 2014. 256 S. ISBN 978-3-7995-5573-9. Geb. € 46,–

Gert Kollmer-von Oheimb-Loup / Jochen Streb (Hg.): Regulierung: Wettbewerbsfördernd oder wettbewerbshemmend? (Stuttgarter historische Studien zur Landes- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Bd. 17). Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag 2012. 220 S. ISBN 978-3-7995-5567-8. € 46,–

Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard models: if children are desirable in part because they provide security in case of disability or old age, then State programs that provide insurance against these events should induce couples to substitute away from children in the allocation of wealth. We test this claim using the introduction of social insurance in Germany in the period 1881-1910. Bismarck's social insurance scheme had three pillars: health insurance, workplace accident insurance, and an old-age pension. Earlier studies typically focus on the pension alone; we consider all three pillars. We find that Bismarck's social insurance system affected fertility overall only via its effects on the incentive to marry. The old-age insurance by itself tended to reduce marriages, but the health and accident insurance components had the opposite effect. For people exposed to all three pillars of social insurance, the two effects cancelled each other and the aggregate effect on fertility was muted. fertility transition; economics; social insurance