Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

All days
Go back

Wednesday 11 April 2012 11.00 - 13.00
X-2 ECO02 Innovation and Human Capital
Wolfson Medical Building: Seminar room 1
Network: Economics Chair: Jochen Streb
Organizers: - Discussant: Jochen Streb
Theresa Gutberlet : Mechanization and Industry Agglomeration in the German Empire
The adoption of water- and steam powered machinery transformed production in manufacturing during the 19th century. In this paper I study the effect of this technological change on the geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in the German Empire in the late 19th century. The adoption of water- and steam power ... (Show more)
The adoption of water- and steam powered machinery transformed production in manufacturing during the 19th century. In this paper I study the effect of this technological change on the geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in the German Empire in the late 19th century. The adoption of water- and steam power created new benefits to agglomeration and new natural resource dependencies, which influenced industry location. Specifically, I show that the adoption of steam power increased industry agglomeration and concentration of manufacturing around hard coal mines. Surprisingly the colocation of manufacturing and hard coal mining is still substantial in the late 19th century despite a significant drop in rail freight charges between 1860 and 1880. The adoption of water power had a negative effect on industry agglomeration, which is consistent with the constraint of locating on rivers and away from other plants that derive their power from the same river. To investigate these effects I constructed a new data set of district-level employment in 134 manufacturing industries in the German Empire and power use in these industries. The OLS estimates show that industries with higher steam power use were more agglomerated and more concentrated in districts with hard coal mining. Industries with higher water power use were less agglomerated. The OLS estimates are reinforced by 2SLS estimation using water- and steam power in U.S. manufacturing as instruments for power use in the German Empire. (Show less)

Nuno Miguel Lima : Private Initiative, Politics and the Role of Networking to Influence Decisions: the Salamanca to the Portuguese Border Railway Lines in the 1880s
Literature on nineteenth-century European railway building has abundantly stressed out the importance of foreign capital in its development. Regardless of the role of state or private initiative, foreign capital was a vital element in many nations’ railway networks, whether in the form of loans to national governments or companies, or ... (Show more)
Literature on nineteenth-century European railway building has abundantly stressed out the importance of foreign capital in its development. Regardless of the role of state or private initiative, foreign capital was a vital element in many nations’ railway networks, whether in the form of loans to national governments or companies, or through direct investment by foreign entrepreneurs. Particularly in the second case, the capacity to influence public policies and decisions could be decisive to make viable the initiative, namely by obtaining certain privileges or even financial support from the state, regional or local authorities.
This was quite common in the Iberian Peninsula, where the financial difficulties of both Portuguese and Spanish governments gave way to foreign initiatives. What was less common was to simultaneously spread this type of influence both in the country of investment and in the country of the investor’s origin. Such was the case in 1881, when an enterprise financed by the banking institutions of Oporto and spearheaded by one of the most important Portuguese businessmen, Henry Burnay, ensured the concession to construct and exploit the two railway connections between Salamanca and the Portuguese border at Barca de Alva (Douro railway line towards Oporto) and Vilar Formoso (Beira Alta railway line towards Figueira da Foz).
To ensure the best financial conditions, Burnay assembled a group of renowned Spanish politicians, with tight bonds both in Madrid and Salamanca, and made use of his influential position close to the Portuguese government. The result was an initiative which ended up being subsidized by the two governments.
As a case study, this paper intends to look at this initiative to understand the relation between public institutions and private agents in a cross-border perspective, with particular attention to social networking as a strategic resource of entrepreneurship. (Show less)

Maurizio Lupo : Technological Innovation in a Peripheral Area: Results from a Research Regarding Inventors, Inventions and Patents in the Italian Mezzogiorno during the First Half of XIXth Century.
The Italian Mezzogiorno – i.e. the Reign of Two Sicilies during the first half of XIX century – was at the edge of the great stream of innovations that interested Euro-pean economy during the XIX century. However, this does not mean that the Reign was completely excluded from the ... (Show more)
The Italian Mezzogiorno – i.e. the Reign of Two Sicilies during the first half of XIX century – was at the edge of the great stream of innovations that interested Euro-pean economy during the XIX century. However, this does not mean that the Reign was completely excluded from the processes elsewhere transforming both the pro-duction and consumption. Which was the effective participation of the Reign to the new technological paradigms that were imposing at international level? Scholars are very sceptical about this matter: the geographic marginality of Italian Mezzogiorno, worse by far to others economic and political problems, caused a technological gap still visible up to today. Nevertheless, this opinion seems too tranchant: in fact we know that in the Reign there was both a successfully importation of technology as well as several original inventions. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper, whose sources consist of the patents registered in the Reign from 1810 up to 1861, is to un-derline the work of several inventors, both local and foreign, who tried to modernize the productive system by means of their inventions.
The exposition is divided in three parts. The first one examines the legislation on the intellectual property, describes the debate about the economic advantage of patents and proposes some data, including a taxonomy, concerning the patents themselves. In the second part, after having introduced inventors and their inventions, the impact of the innovative activity is analyzed by means of some case-studies. The third part exposes the main conclusions of the research: in particular the evidence that the ex-perience of the Reign of Two Sicilies is useful to understand the attitude towards the technological innovation that would have been typical of the whole of Italy starting from the second half of XIXth century up to today. (Show less)

Andrea Maestrejuan : Navigating the Costs of Patent Protection: Individual Inventors and the German Patent System
The first national German patent law was a compromise that tried to strike a balance between the rights of inventors to exclusively use their inventions and the ability of the public to engage in a free market without restrictions. The long battle to adopt a uniform patent code in Germany ... (Show more)
The first national German patent law was a compromise that tried to strike a balance between the rights of inventors to exclusively use their inventions and the ability of the public to engage in a free market without restrictions. The long battle to adopt a uniform patent code in Germany resulted in a patent law that incorporated several unique features. The German patent system included an extended examination process (Aufgebotsverfahren) that allowed inventors to negotiate the merits of their ideas with the patent office. During this period of examination, the inventors received provisional protection on their inventions. In addition, a progressive renewal system was adopted to ensure that German inventors maintained their patent rights only on the most valuable of patents that were worth the costs of renewals, making the German patent system one of the most expensive systems to maintain patent rights. The costs associated with the maintenance of patent protection had broad implications for inventive activity during the Kaiserreich and for current scholars using renewal data to estimate the value of patent protection and technological significance encompassed by a patent. Most economists and economic historians have used patent renewal data extensively to measure the quality of patents and to distribute technological significance across a spectrum of “low value” to “high value” invention according to the criteria of longevity of protection. They assume that inventors “who act optimally” would continue to pay renewal fees only as long as the returns or potential returns on the patented invention exceeded the costs of renewal. Accordingly, most research on German patents concludes that large firms were responsible for the majority of technological gains during the imperial and Weimar periods. In my paper, I challenge this conclusion. I will analyze patent renewal data in combination with patent assignments to demonstrate that independent inventors were not only able to negotiate the obstacles posed by the high cost of patent protection, but were responsible for generating the most valuable new technology (as measured by patenting rates) than even those large firms with in-house research and development laboratories. The unique aspects of the German patent system gave inventors, both individual and corporate, an brief yet relatively inexpensive period of protection in which they could assess the potential value of their patents before confronting the rapidly increasing fees to maintain that protection. By keeping the costs of initial entry low, the German patent system may have provided a mechanism for inventors with fewer resources to protect investments in inventive activity without regard to expectations of long-term protection. (Show less)



Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer