Landowning, Status and Population Growth

This paper considers the effects of the landowning and land reforms on economic and demographic growth by a family-optimization model with endogenous fertility and status-seeking. A land reform provides the peasant with strong incentives to limit their family size and to improve the productivity of the land. Even though the income effect due to the land reform tends to raise fertility, a strong enough status-effect outweighs it, thus generating a decrease in population growth. The European demographic history provides supporting anecdotal evidence for this theoretical result

The Threat of Capital Drain: A Rationale for Public Banks?

This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may be desirable from a regional perspective in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by subsidizing local depositors, for example, through a public guarantee. Under some conditions, cooperative banks can perform the same function without any subsidization; however, they may be crowded out by public banks. We also discuss the impact of the political structure on the emergence of public banks in a political-economy setting and the role of interregional mobility

Beyond the personal–anonymous divide: agency relations in powers of attorney in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Powers of attorney are often interpreted as evidence of trust among the parties involved. We build a novel dataset of notarized powers of attorney, capturing a wide variety of agency relationships in four large French commercial cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to test hypotheses on the relational basis of economic relationships. We find little support for the idea of a radical shift from personal to anonymous relationships during our period. Our results point to more nuanced transformations. The preference for proxies in the same occupation as the principal somewhat declined, while professional proxies emerged and principals used relational chains, especially involving notaries, to find proxies.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151849/1/ehr12784_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151849/2/ehr12784.pd

The Agenda and Relevance of Recent Research in Microfinance

This paper studies recent research efforts in the field of microfinance. Two questions guide the study: What is the agenda of recent research efforts? And, for who is the research relevant? As for the agenda the “yin and yang” of microfinance; impact and sustainability, continue to influence most research efforts. The study illustrates that microfinance attracts mainly the interest of development researchers and journals. Accordingly the researchers seem mainly to interact with the donors’ and practitioners’ communities. The research produced seems to be relevant for them and less so for the governmental and banking communities. The paper concludes proposing the design of a new research agenda, this time in cooperation with the banking community

We do not know the Population of Every Country in the World for the Past Two Thousand Years

Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History, includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. McEvedy and Jones often infer population sizes from their view of a particular economy, making their estimates poor proxies for economic growth. Their rounding means their measurement error is not “classical.” Some economists augment that error by disaggregating regions in unfounded ways. Econometric results that rest on McEvedy and Jones are unreliable

Persistence and Historical Evidence: The Example of the Rise of the Nazi Party

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. Although this influential literature is promising, it raises serious questions about how to distinguish deep causal factors that persist across time from alternative explanations derived from the rapidly changing historical context or misuse of historical sources. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots. Several econometric, analytical, and historical errors undermine the papers’ contention that deeply rooted culture and social capital fuelled the Nazi rise. The general lesson for persistence studies is that beyond careful econometrics and serious consideration of underlying mechanisms (including formal theory), they must pay scrupulous attention to the historical context and the limitations of historical data

Persistence and Historical Evidence: The Example of the Rise of the Nazi Party

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. Although this influential literature is promising, it raises serious questions about how to distinguish deep causal factors that persist across time from alternative explanations derived from the rapidly changing historical context or misuse of historical sources. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots. Several econometric, analytical, and historical errors undermine the papers’ contention that deeply rooted culture and social capital fuelled the Nazi rise. The general lesson for persistence studies is that beyond careful econometrics and serious consideration of underlying mechanisms (including formal theory), they must pay scrupulous attention to the historical context and the limitations of historical data