Who Panics During Panics? Evidence from a Nineteenth Century Savings Bank

Using records of the bank accounts of individual depositors, this paper provides a detailed microeconomic analysis of two nineteenth century banking panics. The panics of 1854 and 1857 were not characterized by an immediate mass panic of depositors and had important time dimensions. We examine depositor behavior using a hazard model. Contagion was the key factor in 1854 but it was not strong enough to create more than a local panic. In contrast, the panic of 1857 began with runs by businessmen and banking sophisticates followed by less informed depositors. Uninformed contagion may have been present, but the evidence suggests that this panic was driven by informational shocks in the face of asymmetric information about the true condition of bank portfolios.

Mortality in the North Dublin Union During the Great Famine

Responsibility for the tremendous excess mortality associated with the Great Irish Famine of 1846-51 is a continuing topic of debate. One view blames an inadequate government response for much of the tragedy. These debates are hampered by a lack of detailed information on how well relief efforts performed at a local level. Excess mortality ranged from one quarter of the entire population in parts of the west to negligible levels along much of the eastern coastline. Much of this cross-section variation reflects relative wealth. But another theme in the historiography stresses the importance of sympathetic or negligent local figures such as a landlord or priest. This study addresses the question of local agency with a case study of the North Dublin Union, the administrative unit responsible for administering the Irish poor law in the northern half of Dublin city and some adjacent parishes. North Dublin Union is unusual for the quality of its surviving administrative records. We use those records to study the Union's day-to-day functioning during the famine and to estimate mortality rates in the workhouse during the crisis. We find that the tremendous mortality of the North Dublin workhouse inmates during the famine primarily reflects the crisis outside the workhouse's walls; the guardians and managers did reasonably well in preserving human life under these trying circumstances.Ireland, famine, mortality, workhouses

The Fertility of the Irish in America in 1910

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 Ireland's 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 continued to have large families, much larger, in fact, than the U.S. native-born population. The fertility differential between these populations was not due to differences in other population characteristics. Rather it was due to the fact that conditional on characteristics, Irish-Americans chose to have larger families. Third, the differential fertility patterns of Irish-Americans were not just due to the effects of being immigrants. Germans and English immigrants also had higher fertility than the native-born population, but to a much larger extent than for the Irish, this higher fertility could be explained by the population characteristics of these groups.Ireland, United States, Fertility, Demography, Immigration

Fertility in South Dublin a Century Ago: A First Look

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 the role of religion, networks, and other factors stressed in the literature on the fertility transition, but the data also show a role for the social-class effects downplayed in recent discussions.Ireland, Fertility, Demography

The Irish Paper Pound of 1797-1820: Some Cliometrics of the Bullionist Debate.

The analysis of the celebrated Bullion Report of 1810 was anticipated in large part by the lesser-known Currency Report of 1804. Both claimed that the phenomena under investigation--the depreciation of the Irish pound in 1803-04 and the rise in the price of gold in 1808-10--were exclusively monetary in origin. The paper uses cointegration techniques in order to test the proposition of the Irish Report. In that case, a 'hard' bullionist interpretation is insufficient to account for the observed exchange rate movements. Copyright 1993 by Royal Economic Society.

Market Contagion: Evidence from the Panics of 1854 and 1857

To test a model of contagion--where individuals hear some bad news and communicate it to their acquaintances, who then pass it on, leading to a market panic--requires a knowledge of the information networks of participants, something hitherto unavailable. For two panics in the 1850s this paper examines the behavior of Irish depositors in a New York bank. As recent immigrants, their social network was determined largely by their place of origin in Ireland, and where they lived in New York. During both panics this social network turns out to be the prime determinant of behavior.