Economists have long neglected study of an important contractual decision, a firm's choice of legal form. Enterprise form shapes the relations among a firm's owners as well as many features of a firm's interactions with the rest of the economy. Using unusual firm-level data on Spain 1886-1936,...

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,...

The German government introduced compulsory accident insurance for industrial firms in 1884. This insurance scheme was one of the main pillars of Bismarck's famous social insurance system. The accident-insurance system achieved only one of its intended goals: it successfully compensated workers...

The most common business enterprise form in Germany today is the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH). The GmbH offers entrepreneurs the partnership's flexibility combined with limited liability, capital lock-in, and other traits associated with corporations. Earlier enterprise forms...

Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard models: if children are desirable in part because they provide security in case of disability or old age, then state programs that provide insurance against these events should...

A considerable theoretical and empirical literature studies the corporation's capital structure. Economists have paid less attention to capital structure in other enterprise forms such as partnerships, which typically operate under different legal constraints and appeal to smaller enterprises....

The 1953 London Debt Agreement settled Germany's 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, gave the debtors a much longer period to repay, and...

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...

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...

This paper presents first results from a project to reconstitute the demographic behavior of three villages in Württemberg (southern Germany) from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Using high-quality registers of births, deaths, and marriages, and unusual ancillary sources, we...