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Abstract
To stimulate projects on the historical economics of wars in the 20th century we advocate three promising research strategies by reviewing recent studies that focus on international or inter-temporal comparisons and on the economic and social consequences of war.

Abstract
The German population's material standard of living during the 'peace years' of the Nazi regime (1933–38) is much debated. We use hitherto disregarded consumption data and the axiom of revealed preferences to test whether the material standard of living improved. We find that the food consumption bundle realized in 1935–36 must have been inferior to that of 1927–28, despite GDP per capita being much higher. Even in 1937–38 consumers were probably worse off compared to 1927–28. We conclude that increasing consumption constraints forced German consumers to diet and thus to a material standard of living that was much more frugal than national income figures suggest.

The German government introduced compulsory accident insurance for industrial firms in 1884. This insurance scheme was one of the main pillars of Bismarck's famous social insurance system. The accident-insurance system achieved only one of its intended goals: it successfully compensated workers and their survivors for losses due to accidents. The accident-insurance system was less successful in limiting the growth of work-related accidents, although that goal had been a reason for the system's creation. We trace the failure to stem the growth of accidents to faulty incentives built into the 1884 legislation. The law created mutual insurance groups that used an experiencerating system that stressed group rather than firm experience, leaving firms with little hope of saving on insurance contributions by improving the safety of their own plants. The government regulator increasingly stressed the imposition of safety rules that would force all firms to adopt certain safety practices. Econometric analysis shows that even the flawed tools available to the insurance groups were powerful, and that more consistent use 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.

This paper studies moral hazard in a sickness-insurance fund that provided the model for socialinsurance schemes around the world. The German Knappschaften were formed in the medieval period to provide sickness, accident, and death benefits for miners. By the mid-nineteenth century, participation in the Knappschaft was compulsory for workers in mines and related occupations, and the range and generosity of benefits had expanded considerably. Each Knappschaft was locally controlled and self-funded, and their admirers saw in them the ability to use local knowledge and good incentives to deliver benefits at low costs. The Knappschaft underlies Bismarck's sickness and accident insurance legislation (1883 and 1884), which in turn forms the basis of the German social-insurance system today and, indirectly, many social-insurance systems around the world. This paper focuses on a problem central to any insurance system, and one that plagued the Knappschaften as they grew larger in the later nineteenth century: the problem of moral hazard. Replacement pay for sick miners made it attractive, on the margin, for miners to invent or exaggerate conditions that made it impossible for them to work. Here we outline the moral hazard problem the Knappschaften faced as well as the internal mechanisms they devised to control it. We then use econometric models to demonstrate that those mechanisms were t best imperfect.

AbstractEconomists 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