SABIIA - Sistema Aberto e Integrado de Informação em Agricultura (Sabiia)

Brown, John C.; Guinnane, Timothy W..

The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth century, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. Disagreement persists in part because researchers have rarely used the detailed quantitative information necessary to form adequate tests of alternative theories. This paper uses district-level data from Bavaria to study the correlates of the decline of fertility in that German kingdom in the nineteenth century. Bavarias fertility transition was later and less dramatic than in other parts of Germany. The European Fertility Project, the most influential study of the European fertility transition, used very large units of analysis...

For Every Law, a Loophole: Flexibility in the Menu of Spanish Business Forms, 1886-1936

Palavras-chave: Fertility transition; Migration; Germany; Labor and Human Capital; N3; J1.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28508

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Marrinez Rodriguez, Susana.

The Spanish business code allowed firms great flexibility in their organizational form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Until 1920, firms had the same basic choices as in France and some other European countries, namely, the corporation, the ordinary partnership, or the limited partnership. But Spanish law was unusually flexible, allowing firms to adapt the corporation especially to the needs of its owners. Starting in 1920 Spanish firms could also organize as a Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada (SRL), a form similar to the German GmbH or the British Private Limited Company (PLC). But some firms had already adopted the form prior to 1920. The Spanish coded lacked the principle of “numerus clauses” that is central to many areas of law....

Tipo: Working Paper

Palavras-chave: Spanish economic history; Legal form of enterprise; Law and finance; Financial Economics; Industrial Organization; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; K20; N43; N44.

Ano: 2012

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/123319

Moral Hazard in a Mutual Health-Insurance System: German Knappschaften, 1867-1914

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Streb, Jochen.

This paper studies moral hazard in a sickness-insurance fund that provided the model for social-insurance 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 cost. The Knappschaft underlies Bismarck’s sickness and accident insurance legislation (1883 and 1884), which in turn forms the basis of the German...

Two Statistical Problems in the Princeton Project on the European Fertility Transition

Palavras-chave: Sickness insurance; Moral hazard; Knappschaft; Social insurance; Health Economics and Policy; Political Economy; Public Economics; N33; N43; H55; H53; I18.

Ano: 2009

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/54533

Brown, John C.; Guinnane, Timothy W..

The Princeton Project on the Decline of Fertility in Europe (or European Fertility Project, hereafter EFP) was carried out at Princeton University's Office of Population Research in the 1960s and 1970s. This project aimed to characterize the decline of fertility that took place in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project's summary statements argued that social and economic forces played little role in bringing about the fertility transition. The statement stresses instead a process of innovation and diffusion. A central feature of the EFP argument is a series of statistical exercises that purport to show that changes in economic and social conditions exerted little influence on fertility. Two recent papers on Germany for...

Social Class and the Fertility Transition: A Critical Comment on the Statistical Results Reported in Simon Szreter's Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940

Palavras-chave: Fertility transition; Labor and Human Capital; J13; N33; O15.

Ano: 2003

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28392

Barnes, Geoffrey; Guinnane, Timothy W..

Simon Szreter’s book Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross-sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter’s conclusion made the book immediately influential, and it remains so. This finding matters a great deal for debates about the causes of the European fertility decline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For decades scholars have argued whether the main forces at work were ideational or social and economic. This note reports a simple re-analysis of Szreter’s own data, which suggests that social class does explain cross-sectional differences in English marital fertility in 1911.

Financial Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: The 1953 London Debt Agreement

Palavras-chave: Fertility transition; 1911 Census of England and Wales; Consumer/Household Economics; Labor and Human Capital; J13; N33.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/97338

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germanys debts from the period between the two world wars, and allowed the country to re-establish its role in international capital markets. The Agreement wrote-down the overall debt by about 50 percent and gave the debtors a much longer period to repay. One interesting clause in the Agreement allowed Germany to postpone some payments until such time as re-unification. The Agreement reflects a subtle and responsible understanding of the problems associated with the reparations and debt crises of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as fears about the moral hazard problems that would arise with making any part of the Agreement contingent on events Germany could influence. Recent advocates of third-world debt relief have held...

Ownership and Control in the Entrepreneurial Firm: An International History of Private Limited Companies

Palavras-chave: Germany; London Debt Agreement; Sovereign debt; Debt overhang; HIPC initiative; Financial Economics; N24; F34.

Ano: 2004

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28387

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Harris, Ron; Lamoreaux, Naomi R.; Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent.

We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form of business organization. Data on the number and types of firms organized in France, Germany, the UK, and the US show that that the PLLC became the form of choice for small- and medium-size enterprises wherever and whenever it was introduced. The PLLC’s key advantage was its flexible internal governance rules that allowed its users to limit the threat of untimely dissolution inherent in partnerships without taking on the full danger of minority oppression that the...

Delegated Monitors, Large and Small: The Development of Germany's Banking System, 1800-1914

Palavras-chave: Limited company; Partnership; Corporation; Legal regime; Common law; Civil law; Financial Economics; N8; G3; O16; K22.

Ano: 2007

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/6879

Banks play a greater role in the German financial system than in the United States or Britain. Germanys large universal banks are admired by those who advocate bank deregulation in the United States. Others admire the universal banks for their supposed role in corporate governance and industrial finance. Many discussions distort the German Banking system by overstressing one of several types of banks, and ignore the competition and cooperation between the famous universal banks and other banking groups. Tracing the historical development of the German banking system from the early nineteenth century places the large universal banks in context.

Bringing "Honest Capital" to Poor Borrowers: The Passage of the Uniform Small Loan Law, 1907-1930

Palavras-chave: Universal banking; German banks; German economic history; Financial Economics; G2; G3; N2.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28447

Carruthers, Bruce G.; Guinnane, Timothy W.; Lee, Yoonseok.

The Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) was the Russell Sage Foundation’s primary device for fighting what it viewed as the scourge of high-rate lending to poor people in the first half of the twentieth century. The USLL created a new class of lenders who could make small loans at interest rates exceeding those allowed for banks under the normal usury laws. About two-thirds of the states had passed the USLL by the 1930. This paper describes the USLL and then uses econometric models to investigate the state characteristics that influenced the law’s passage. We find that urbanization and state-level economic characteristics played significant roles. So did measures of the state’s banking system. We find no evidence that party-political affiliations had any effect,...

Institutions and Demographic Responses to Shocks: Wuttemberg, 1634-1870

Palavras-chave: Uniform law; Small loans; Consumer credit; Usury laws; Consumer/Household Economics; Financial Economics; Political Economy; N21; N22; I38; G21; G28; K23.

Ano: 2009

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/50949

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Ogilvie, Sheilagh.

Simple Malthusian models remain an important tool for understanding pre-modern demographic systems and their connection to the economy. But most recent literature has lost sight of the institutional context for demographic behavior that lay at the heart of Malthus’s own analysis. This paper estimates a short-run version of a Malthusian model for two Württemberg communities from 1646 to 1870. Württemberg differed institutionally from the northwest European societies analyzed in previous studies. The impact of institutional differences shows clearly in differing demographic reactions to economic shocks. Mortality was less sensitive to shocks than one would expect, while nuptiality was especially sensitive.

The Fertility of the Irish in America in 1910

Palavras-chave: Malthusian models; Mortality; Fertility; Nuptiality; Guilds; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; Labor and Human Capital; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods; N33; J10.

Ano: 2008

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/5977

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Moehling, Carolyn M.; Grada, Cormac O.

In most western societies, marital fertility began to decline in the nineteenth century. But in Ireland, fertility in marriage remained stubbornly high into the twentieth century. Explanations of Irelands late entry to the fertility transition focus on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Irish society. These arguments are often backed up by claims that the Irish outside of Ireland behaved the same way. This paper investigates these claims by examining the marital fertility of Irish Americans in 1910 and produces three main findings. First, the Irish in America had smaller families than both the rural and urban Irish and their fertility patterns show clear evidence of fertility control. Second, despite the evidence of control, Irish-Americans...

Fertility in South Dublin a Century Ago: A First Look

Palavras-chave: Ireland; United States; Fertility; Demography; Immigration; Labor and Human Capital; J13; N3.

Ano: 2002

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28386

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Moehling, Carolyn M.; Grada, Cormac O.

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study fertility in Dublin and Belfast. Our larger project aims to use the extensive literature on the fertility transition elsewhere in Europe to refine and test leading hypotheses in their Irish context. The present paper uses a sample from the Dublin suburb of Pembroke to take a first look at the questions, data, and methods. This sample is much larger than those used in previous studies of Irish fertility, and is the first from an urban area. We find considerable support for...

Did the Cooperative Start Life as a Joint-Stock Company? Business Law and Cooperatives in Spain, 1869-1931

Palavras-chave: Ireland; Fertility; Demography; Labor and Human Capital; J1; N3.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28434

Guinnane, Timothy W.; Martinez-Rodriguez, Susana.

Studies of Spanish cooperatives date their spread from the Law on Agrarian Syndicates of 1906. But the first legislative appearance of cooperatives is an 1869 measure that permitted general incorporation for lending companies. The 1931 general law on cooperatives, which was the first act permitting the formation of cooperatives in any activity, reflects the gradual disappearance of the cooperative’s “business” characteristics. In this paper we trace the Spanish cooperative’s legal roots in business law and its connections to broader questions of the freedom of association, the formation of joint-stock enterprises, and the liability of investors in business and cooperative entities. Our account underscores the similarities of the organizational problems...

Trust: A Concept Too Many

Palavras-chave: Cooperative; General incorporation; Business enterprise; Freedom of association; Freedom of contract; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; N43- N23; K20.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/90880

Research on trust now forms a prominent part of the research agenda in history and the social sciences. Although this research has generated useful insights, the idea of trust has been used so widely and loosely that it risks creating more confusion than clarity. This essay argues that to the extent that scholars have a clear idea of what trust actually means, the concept is, at least for economic questions, superfluous: the useful parts of the idea of trust are implicit in older notions of information and the ability to impose sanctions. I trust you in a transaction because of what I know about you, and because of what I can have done to you should you cheat me. This observation does not obviate what many scholars intend, which is to embed economic...

The Historical Fertility Transition: A Guide for Economists

Palavras-chave: Trust; Social capital; Credit cooperatives; Uniform laws; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; G2; N2.

Ano: 2005

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/28440

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many as eight children each, and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive. Today, many women have no children at all, and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes is zero or even negative. This paper discusses the large literature on the historical fertility transition, focusing on what we do and do not know about the process. I stress some possible misunderstandings of the demographic literature, and discuss an agenda for future work.