In the second half of the nineteenth century, the patent office of the German state Wuerttemberg strategically discriminated against foreign inventors by charging comparatively high patent fees. We show that this administrative practice was driven by fiscal and protectionist motives.

Germany introduced compulsory industrial accident insurance in 1884. The accident-insurance system compensated injured workers and survivors for losses, but initially failed to limit the growth of accident rates. We trace this failure to the 1884 law's faulty incentives and to an initial unwillingness to use the tools built into the law. The government regulator increasingly stressed rules that forced firms to adopt specific safety-enhancing innovations and practices. Econometric analysis shows that more consistent use of the rules and the limited incentives available under the law would have reduced industrial accidents earlier and more extensively.

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 statistics to analyze firms’ activities between 1877 and 1932. We show that German firms deployed imitating strategies in the late nineteenth century and the 1920s to catch-up to their American competitors. The German administration supported this strategy by stipulating a patent law that discriminated against foreign patent holders and by delaying the granting of patents to foreign applicants.

The Knappschaft was a mutual association through which German miners insured themselves against accident, illness, and old age. The Knappschaft underlies Bismarck's sickness and accident insurance legislation, and thus Germany's system today. This article focuses on moral hazard, which plagued the Knappschaften in the later nineteenth century. Sick pay made it attractive for miners to feign illness that made them unable to work. We outline the moral hazard problem the Knappschaften faced as well as the mechanisms they devised to control it, and then use econometric models to demonstrate that those mechanisms were at best imperfect.