Tobias A Jopp
Biographic Data
| ID | 1053160 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tobias A Jopp |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tobias A |
| FAMILY NAME | Jopp |
| SIGNATURE | JOPP T A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Regensburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5317-0690 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On the Economic Costs of the Spanish Flu Pandemic in Germany: An attempt at Assessing GNP Lost for 1918
Evidence on the economic costs of the Spanish flu pandemic between 1918 and 1920 in Germany is still scarce. An analysis of the second-largest German sickness fund at the time, which covered mineworkers in the Ruhr area, helps assess two types of short term costs to the German economy in 1918, the first, and worst, year of the pandemic: the direct monetary costs to the health insurance system arising from excess sick claims; and, by combining mor…
Epidemics and Pandemics in Economic-historical Perspective – An Introduction
Epidemics and pandemics have been a constant feature of human life across all regions and historical periods. They have led to individual suffering, brought on far-reaching societal challenges and shaped demographic trends. Their effects persist far into the future and are not fully understood yet. One area that still merits further research concerns the economic costs attached to pandemics in the short, medium, and long term. The articles assemb…
The German Cliometrics Database
This short article introduces the German Cliometrics Database as the foundation for an article by Jopp and Spoerer (2024) who trace cliometric research on German history. This newly constructed database of every publication that (1) contributes to the historiography of Germany and (2) employs, as a baseline, inferential statistics enables researchers to find cliometric studies related to their own work much more efficiently. Even though no full t…
Civil aircraft procurement and colonial ties: Evidence on the market for jetliners, 1952–89
We investigate the extent to which (quasi-)colonial ties played a role in the procurement of jet aircraft by airlines in the Global South. Because we do not have access to archival data on the sensitive issue of aircraft procurement, we take an indirect empirical approach. Our investigation is based on a dataset including all Western jet aircraft delivered between 1952 and 1989. We ask if, to what extent, and how long airlines from former British…
Turn, Turn, Turn: A Digital History of German Historiography, 1950-2019
The increasing availability of digital text collections and the corresponding establishment of methods for computer-assisted analysis offer completely new perspectives on historical textual sources and historiographical output. The results of a topic-modeling analysis exploring publication trends in eleven leading German-language history journals (around 9,000 original research articles) since World War II reveal several epistemological turns tha…
War, Bond Prices, and Public Opinion: How Did the Amsterdam Bond Market Perceive the Belligerents' War Effort During World War One?
The First World War was a watershed in the evolution of warfare, politics, economics, and the social sphere. One persistent topic in the historiography of the war is how contemporaries perceived the war's outbreak and its course. Tobias A. Jopp contributes to the related research from a new angle by analysing a quantitative source of perception that has hitherto been largely neglected, namely, the prices at which sovereign bonds were traded in th…
Diskurs, Narrativ, Sonderweg, Hitler, Turn. Konjunkturen geschichtswissenschaftlicher Begriffe im „Clio Viewer“
Auf Anregung einer (nichtrepräsentativen) Twitterumfrage unter Historikerinnen und Historikern möchten wir in diesem Beitrag ein von uns zusammengetragenes Korpus an Aufsätzen aus elf geschichtswissenschaftlichen Fachjournalen vorstellen und anhand einiger Beispiele illustrieren, wie sich der Gebrauch verschiedener prägnanter geschichtswissenschaftlicher (Leit‐) Begriffe seit 1950 verändert hat. Das Ziel ist nicht, eine „digitale Begriffsgeschich…
Government Bonds Traded at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange 1914–1919: A Dataset on the Full Cross-Section of Prices
This paper introduces a novel dataset on the secondary market prices of all government bonds traded at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange between 1 January 1914 and 31 December 1919. In all, the dataset comprises about 161,000 daily price quotes on 288 government bond subseries issued by 38 different countries. The dataset complements the recent studies by Jopp (2014, 2016, 2018, 2021) on the question of how the Amsterdam capital market perceived the C…
War, Coal, and Forced Labor: Assessing the Impact of Prisoner-of-War Employment on Coal Mine Productivity in World War I Germany
This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that t…
Zur Konjunktur des Zählens – oder wie man Quantifizierung quantifiziert. Eine empirische Analyse der Anwendung quantitativer Methoden in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft
Historiker können heute auf einen gut gefüllten methodischen Werkzeugkasten zurückgreifen. Seit der Etablierung der Sozialgeschichte als „Historische Sozialwissenschaft“ in den 1970er Jahren gehören dazu neben qualitativ-hermeneutischen Ansätzen grundsätzlich auch quantitativ-statistische Methoden. Viele Quellen lassen einen quantitativen Analyseansatz zumindest zu; andere (z. B. Massendaten) sind ohne die Anwendung entsprechender Methoden gar ni…
Ten Years of Daily Stock Prices on Seven Major Prussian Railways (1875–1884): An Introduction to the Data
We present a dataset on daily spot and forward prices of seven major Prussian railway companies’ stock as traded at Berlin Stock Exchange between 1875 and 1884. In late 1879, the Prussian state began to nationalize the entire railway system in its territory. Measured in railway kilometers owned by the state, most of it had been nationalized by the end of 1884. Our data cover the run-up to the nationalization of the Prussian railways and the impor…
How Does the Public Perceive Alliances: The Central and Allied Powers in World War I
World War I was fought by numerous countries siding together as the Central Powers and, respectively, the Allied Powers. The former began with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary and grew to four allies when the Ottoman Empire entered the scene in late 1914 and Bulgaria in late 1915; the latter centred on the alliance between England, France, and Russia and was informally extended to many more countries as they entered into the war ad-hoc by si…
Ein glücksökonomisch modifizierter Human Development Index für Deutschland (1920-1960)
The United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) has become an important tool for measuring and comparing living standards between countries and regions. However, the HDI has also attracted a fair share of conceptual criticism. Starting from Andrea Wagner’s historical estimations of a HDI for Germany in the interwar and early postwar period, we take up part of that criticism by implementing three essential modifications to the mode of calculatio…
Did closures do any good? Labour productivity, mine dynamics, and rationalization in interwar Ruhr coal mining
Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that 'negative rationalization', in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924-9, played a significant role in stimulating aggr…
How Technologically Progressive Was Germany in the Interwar Period? Evidence on Total Factor Productivity in Coal Mining
The discussion of the rationalization wave in German industry (1924-1929) still lacks proper industry-level estimates of the rate of technological progress. To close part of this gap, this article investigates total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hard coal mining over the extended period 1913-1938. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is applied to a sample of firms from the Ruhr coal district. TFP grew positively overall and specifically from 1924-…
After us, the deluge: German miners' experience with pay-as-you-go pensions and the intergenerational contract before the great inflation
Many public pension insurance schemes today use the pay-as-you-go financing mechanism. This mechanism is vulnerable to an ageing population, which puts pressure on the intergenerational contract implicit in these schemes and raises the question as to how they might be eroded. This is not a new problem, and to put it into historical perspective, this article studies the intergenerational contract that formed the core of the Prussian miners' invali…
How did the Capital Market Evaluate Germany’s Prospects for Winning World War I? Evidence from the Amsterdam Market for Government Bonds
This study uses prices for the German 3 percent imperial loan issued in several tranches since 1890 and still traded during World War I to measure capital market players’ real-time perceptions of the prospects for Germany as the war proceeded. Price data are gathered from the Amsterdam market for government bonds; the Netherlands remained neutral throughout war. Focusing on the window from August 24th 1915 to August 11th 1919, ten (twelve) turnin…
Old times, better times? German miners' Knappschaften , pay-as-you-go pensions, and implicit rates of return, 1854–1913
This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural ofKnappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory invalidity and implicit old-age insurance, and studies the period from 1854 to 1913. Knappschaften used the pay-as-you-go mechanism, and, in the long ter…
Old times, better times? German miners' Knappschaften , pay-as-you-go pensions, and implicit rates of return, 1854–1913
This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural ofKnappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory invalidity and implicit old-age insurance, and studies the period from 1854 to 1913. Knappschaften used the pay-as-you-go mechanism, and, in the long ter…
Did closures do any good? Labour productivity, mine dynamics, and rationalization in interwar Ruhr coal mining
Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that 'negative rationalization', in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924-9, played a significant role in stimulating aggr…
War, Coal, and Forced Labor: Assessing the Impact of Prisoner-of-War Employment on Coal Mine Productivity in World War I Germany
This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that t…
How Technologically Progressive Was Germany in the Interwar Period? Evidence on Total Factor Productivity in Coal Mining
The discussion of the rationalization wave in German industry (1924-1929) still lacks proper industry-level estimates of the rate of technological progress. To close part of this gap, this article investigates total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hard coal mining over the extended period 1913-1938. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is applied to a sample of firms from the Ruhr coal district. TFP grew positively overall and specifically from 1924-…
Old times, better times? German miners' Knappschaften , pay-as-you-go pensions, and implicit rates of return, 1854–1913
This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural ofKnappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory invalidity and implicit old-age insurance, and studies the period from 1854 to 1913. Knappschaften used the pay-as-you-go mechanism, and, in the long ter…
How did the Capital Market Evaluate Germany’s Prospects for Winning World War I? Evidence from the Amsterdam Market for Government Bonds
This study uses prices for the German 3 percent imperial loan issued in several tranches since 1890 and still traded during World War I to measure capital market players’ real-time perceptions of the prospects for Germany as the war proceeded. Price data are gathered from the Amsterdam market for government bonds; the Netherlands remained neutral throughout war. Focusing on the window from August 24th 1915 to August 11th 1919, ten (twelve) turnin…
How Technologically Progressive Was Germany in the Interwar Period? Evidence on Total Factor Productivity in Coal Mining
The discussion of the rationalization wave in German industry (1924-1929) still lacks proper industry-level estimates of the rate of technological progress. To close part of this gap, this article investigates total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hard coal mining over the extended period 1913-1938. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is applied to a sample of firms from the Ruhr coal district. TFP grew positively overall and specifically from 1924-…
After us, the deluge: German miners' experience with pay-as-you-go pensions and the intergenerational contract before the great inflation
Many public pension insurance schemes today use the pay-as-you-go financing mechanism. This mechanism is vulnerable to an ageing population, which puts pressure on the intergenerational contract implicit in these schemes and raises the question as to how they might be eroded. This is not a new problem, and to put it into historical perspective, this article studies the intergenerational contract that formed the core of the Prussian miners' invali…
Ein glücksökonomisch modifizierter Human Development Index für Deutschland (1920-1960)
The United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) has become an important tool for measuring and comparing living standards between countries and regions. However, the HDI has also attracted a fair share of conceptual criticism. Starting from Andrea Wagner’s historical estimations of a HDI for Germany in the interwar and early postwar period, we take up part of that criticism by implementing three essential modifications to the mode of calculatio…
Did closures do any good? Labour productivity, mine dynamics, and rationalization in interwar Ruhr coal mining
Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that 'negative rationalization', in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924-9, played a significant role in stimulating aggr…
How Does the Public Perceive Alliances: The Central and Allied Powers in World War I
World War I was fought by numerous countries siding together as the Central Powers and, respectively, the Allied Powers. The former began with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary and grew to four allies when the Ottoman Empire entered the scene in late 1914 and Bulgaria in late 1915; the latter centred on the alliance between England, France, and Russia and was informally extended to many more countries as they entered into the war ad-hoc by si…
Zur Konjunktur des Zählens – oder wie man Quantifizierung quantifiziert. Eine empirische Analyse der Anwendung quantitativer Methoden in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft
Historiker können heute auf einen gut gefüllten methodischen Werkzeugkasten zurückgreifen. Seit der Etablierung der Sozialgeschichte als „Historische Sozialwissenschaft“ in den 1970er Jahren gehören dazu neben qualitativ-hermeneutischen Ansätzen grundsätzlich auch quantitativ-statistische Methoden. Viele Quellen lassen einen quantitativen Analyseansatz zumindest zu; andere (z. B. Massendaten) sind ohne die Anwendung entsprechender Methoden gar ni…
Ten Years of Daily Stock Prices on Seven Major Prussian Railways (1875–1884): An Introduction to the Data
We present a dataset on daily spot and forward prices of seven major Prussian railway companies’ stock as traded at Berlin Stock Exchange between 1875 and 1884. In late 1879, the Prussian state began to nationalize the entire railway system in its territory. Measured in railway kilometers owned by the state, most of it had been nationalized by the end of 1884. Our data cover the run-up to the nationalization of the Prussian railways and the impor…
War, Bond Prices, and Public Opinion: How Did the Amsterdam Bond Market Perceive the Belligerents' War Effort During World War One?
The First World War was a watershed in the evolution of warfare, politics, economics, and the social sphere. One persistent topic in the historiography of the war is how contemporaries perceived the war's outbreak and its course. Tobias A. Jopp contributes to the related research from a new angle by analysing a quantitative source of perception that has hitherto been largely neglected, namely, the prices at which sovereign bonds were traded in th…
Diskurs, Narrativ, Sonderweg, Hitler, Turn. Konjunkturen geschichtswissenschaftlicher Begriffe im „Clio Viewer“
Auf Anregung einer (nichtrepräsentativen) Twitterumfrage unter Historikerinnen und Historikern möchten wir in diesem Beitrag ein von uns zusammengetragenes Korpus an Aufsätzen aus elf geschichtswissenschaftlichen Fachjournalen vorstellen und anhand einiger Beispiele illustrieren, wie sich der Gebrauch verschiedener prägnanter geschichtswissenschaftlicher (Leit‐) Begriffe seit 1950 verändert hat. Das Ziel ist nicht, eine „digitale Begriffsgeschich…
Government Bonds Traded at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange 1914–1919: A Dataset on the Full Cross-Section of Prices
This paper introduces a novel dataset on the secondary market prices of all government bonds traded at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange between 1 January 1914 and 31 December 1919. In all, the dataset comprises about 161,000 daily price quotes on 288 government bond subseries issued by 38 different countries. The dataset complements the recent studies by Jopp (2014, 2016, 2018, 2021) on the question of how the Amsterdam capital market perceived the C…
War, Coal, and Forced Labor: Assessing the Impact of Prisoner-of-War Employment on Coal Mine Productivity in World War I Germany
This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that t…
Turn, Turn, Turn: A Digital History of German Historiography, 1950-2019
The increasing availability of digital text collections and the corresponding establishment of methods for computer-assisted analysis offer completely new perspectives on historical textual sources and historiographical output. The results of a topic-modeling analysis exploring publication trends in eleven leading German-language history journals (around 9,000 original research articles) since World War II reveal several epistemological turns tha…
The German Cliometrics Database
This short article introduces the German Cliometrics Database as the foundation for an article by Jopp and Spoerer (2024) who trace cliometric research on German history. This newly constructed database of every publication that (1) contributes to the historiography of Germany and (2) employs, as a baseline, inferential statistics enables researchers to find cliometric studies related to their own work much more efficiently. Even though no full t…
Civil aircraft procurement and colonial ties: Evidence on the market for jetliners, 1952–89
We investigate the extent to which (quasi-)colonial ties played a role in the procurement of jet aircraft by airlines in the Global South. Because we do not have access to archival data on the sensitive issue of aircraft procurement, we take an indirect empirical approach. Our investigation is based on a dataset including all Western jet aircraft delivered between 1952 and 1989. We ask if, to what extent, and how long airlines from former British…
On the Economic Costs of the Spanish Flu Pandemic in Germany: An attempt at Assessing GNP Lost for 1918
Evidence on the economic costs of the Spanish flu pandemic between 1918 and 1920 in Germany is still scarce. An analysis of the second-largest German sickness fund at the time, which covered mineworkers in the Ruhr area, helps assess two types of short term costs to the German economy in 1918, the first, and worst, year of the pandemic: the direct monetary costs to the health insurance system arising from excess sick claims; and, by combining mor…
Epidemics and Pandemics in Economic-historical Perspective – An Introduction
Epidemics and pandemics have been a constant feature of human life across all regions and historical periods. They have led to individual suffering, brought on far-reaching societal challenges and shaped demographic trends. Their effects persist far into the future and are not fully understood yet. One area that still merits further research concerns the economic costs attached to pandemics in the short, medium, and long term. The articles assemb…
Economics (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · German (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Finance (5 works) · Economy (4 works) · Finance (4 works) · History (4 works)