The articles published in this special issue of the European Review of Economic History were originally presented at the First German Cliometrics Conference held at the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 23–26 September 1999. The conference was organised by Scott Eddie, John Komlos and Jörg Baten. The essay by Richard Tilly on German Economic History and Cliometrics serves as an introduction.

This article discusses recent cliometric contributions by German and non-German economic historians to the field of German economic history. After a brief attempt to describe the field in Germany I survey recent work in four specific topical areas – which thus serve as rough indices of the spread and development of econometric and quantitative techniques in the field. I conclude that a German ‘cliometric revolution’ has not yet taken place, but that promising beginnings have been made.

As recent commentaries on Western European unemployment have noted, high unemployment, limited worker mobility, and a limited creation of jobs characterise the current inflexible labour market structures. This article uses a new source, extracts from the Arbeiterbücher of eight German firms found in textiles and heavy industry during the period of high industrialisation, to identify key features of the labour markets of pre-1914 Germany. The results are consistent with neo-classical economic models of labour markets. Hazard analysis of firm employment records suggests that while marital status played an important role in mobility, even older workers held three to four times as many jobs as workers today. Information and skill levels were also crucial determinants. Mobility was highly responsive to shifts in demand conditions as well.

This article analyses three crucial elections which determined the fate of free trade in Britain and Germany. These are the elections of 1906 in the UK and 1877 and 1878 in Germany. We examine the political economy of trade policy by examining the voting patterns of the electorates in their choice of commercial policy. The underlying hypothesis to be explored is that voting behaviour was based on the economic interests of the constituents as determined by the international trade performance of the sector in which they were employed. An econometric model reveals the degree to which the support for and opposition to free trade was based on occupational characteristics and well explains the outcome for Germany in 1877. The analysis for Britain extends previous work by Irwin (1994) by assessing how considerations of turnout, religion and restricted voting rights alter the results of his original model. In 1878 in Germany religious affiliation and turnout played a significant role in the result although not in the ways assumed by historians, in particular the outcome of the election was not determined by the mobilisation of agricultural labourers on the great estates. The results of estimating the model shows that franchise restrictions contributed to the victory of free trade in Britain, but their absence had no impact on the result in Germany.

This article analyses the impact of the onset of the Great Depression on voting patterns at the local level in the final years of the Weimar Republic. A special pooled longitudinal/cross sectional, fixed-effects approach with spatial autocorrelation (EGLS) is used in order to simultaneously estimate the popularity determinants for the entire system of political parties for each of the 830 localities in our data set. By analysing the determinants for the vote shares of all major parties/party blocs we demonstrate unequivocally that the economic crisis was the crucial prerequisite for the political collapse of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to other empirical studies in this field, we use an essentially longitudinal approach by which we can completely avoid the problems associated with ecological inference and show that unemployment had a strong positive effect in favour of the National Socialists. Because of using aggregated data, we cannot, however, distinguish between egotropic and sociotropic voting behaviour.

We analyse a newly constructed data set of monthly prices for wheat and rye in Nuremberg (1490–1855) to address the issue whether models of rational investment behaviour provide an adequate description of grain markets and grain storage in early modern Europe. Based on the empirical evidence presented here we conclude that the case for well functioning arbitrage in the market for grain in Nuremberg is quite weak. This can only partly be explained by the institutional background.