Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the intensity of medieval trade ows between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modied version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of...