Volume 25, Issue 4 - Special Issue on New Data Frontiers in German Economic History

The article provides an overview of the historical organization of data collection on vital events and population in German territories during the pre-statistical era and briefly presents about a dozen related datasets. Data can be divided into the two categories of aggregate data on population and vital rates at the national, regional and community levels, and of nominative data at individual and household levels. The latter type of data is typically available only for individual communities or parishes. We illustrate the use of the datasets in published studies and point to directions for future research. The most important recent development concerns the increasing availability of indexed church records and online village genealogies, which offer a vast and little exploited potential for analysing the demographic patterns that prevailed prior to the onset of the demographic transition.

This article surveys the measurement of historical wealth and income inequality in Germany. We discuss the underlying data sources, the challenges they pose, and the opportunities they create. We also identify two promising avenues for future research. First, we argue that the geographic granularity of German historical statistics provides researchers with the opportunity to investigate the causes of inequality. Second, several dimensions of historical inequality remain under-explored, for example, the equalizing role of welfare state institutions such as public pensions.

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 present a new disaggregated dataset on Germany’s exports and imports from 1880 to 1913. The data covers trade in both quantity and value at the product level. It thus comprises the universe of the data in terms of products and trade partners, at annual frequency. To ensure comparability over time and to data from other countries, the historical product categories are re-classified according to the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC, Rev. 2 and Rev. 4). Moreover, we integrate Hamburg and Bremen into the German trade statistics – two important port cities, which were not covered by the major German trade records until 1888. We describe the new data in terms of five stylized facts and make suggestions for its use in research.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the most important sources and data available for the German capital market, highlighting their capabilities and limitations. We focus on firm-specific information related to stock corporations and price data for the 19th and early 20th Century. By reviewing examples from existing literature, we illustrate the practical applications of these sources. We also launch a new stock index derived from the daily prices of 39 banks listed on the Berlin Stock Exchange, demonstrating the potential of price data for market analysis.