I am a researcher at the Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology in Heidelberg. (→ Read a short bio.)

Recent Work

“Comparative Nonprofit Sector Research: A Critical Assessment,” to appear in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, edited by Walter W. Powell, Particia Bromley. / Summary
“Civil society in times of change: shrinking, changing and expanding spaces and the need for new regulatory approaches,” Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal 13 (2019) 1--27. / Summary

Recent Writing

A Visual History of Patent Protection

3 September 2021 I noticed that most articles in economic journals avoid to visualize the scores of patent rights indexes. But doing so is quite helpful to understand how patentability, compulsory licensing and patent terms have changed over time. The following graphs are based on the widely used patent rights index by Park and colleagues. This index is available for 122 countries over 55 years and consist of five main categories: coverage + membership + loss of rights + duration + enforcement Coverage A country has high coverage, according to the index, if it grants patents for formerly unpatentable „technologies“:

El Greco color palette for R

9 June 2020

I have created a small R package with color palettes from El Greco paintings. It’s available on Github: https://github.com/markushlang/elgreco

Spanish Flu Datasets

15 April 2020 I have bundled a few datasets mentioned in Alfred W. Crosby’s (2003) book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic” into an R package. In addition to Crosby’s data, I have also added data on non-pharmaceutical interventions by larger U.S. cities during the 1918 and 1919 outbreak from Howard Markel and colleagues. The spanishflu package can be used to create figures similar to current COVID-19 figures. This is a small example on how to do that: