Abstract
Human capital, access to markets, and innovation-friendly institutions were important preconditions for the acceleration of technological change during the industrial revolution. In this context, the recent literature discusses the role of patents. Given their dual nature, patents may have either stimulated innovation through the creation of financial incentives for inventors or they may have hampered innovation, because they created monopolies that restricted the free flow of knowledge. For this reason, the overall effects of patents on innovation and, eventually, long-run economic growth are not clear. In order to develop a better understanding of the determinants of innovation, this special issue of the Economic History Yearbook therefore focuses on the causes and consequences of patent laws and patent law reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in different European countries.
About the authors
is Postdoctoral Researcher in Economic History at the University of Mannheim. His research focuses on the economic history of Germany in the 19th and early 20th century. Alexander Donges holds a Ph.D. (2013) in Economics from the University of Mannheim. During his doctoral studies, he was visiting researcher at NTNU Trondheim and fellow of the research group "Thyssen in the 20th century" at the University of Bonn. Before, Alexander Donges studied Economics (degree: Diplom-Volkswirt) at the University of Mannheim.
is lecturer (Akademischer Rat) in Economic History at the University of Bonn, Germany. He studied Economics and History at the University of Mannheim between 2003 and 2007. In his Ph.D. thesis (2013, Mannheim) he analysed the implementation of administrative and legal reforms in the German state of Baden during the nineteenth-century. Between 2013 and 2016 he was a Post-Doc in the DFG-project “The Political Economy of Corporate Governance” at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
