This study uses the example of the German cooperatives to test one hypothesis often advanced by advocates of microcredit institutions: that cooperatives succeeded because they overcame problems caused by asymmetric information and enforcement problems in credit markets.

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failure by scattering his arable land Throughout his village, McCloskey argued, because formal insurance institutions did not exist. A Village of rational peasants facing idiosyncratic risks, Kimball replied, should have helped each other through...

In this paper I will provide a quick overview of the available quantitative source on mortality and what has been done with them. I will then turn biefly to what one quantative, impressionistic source has to say about mortality. I wil then offer an econometric analysis of the famines's toll. The...

I have proposed the structuration model as recently reformulated by William Sewell for the conceptualization of international migrations, arguing that its capacity to link macro- and micro-level social phenomena while keeping the latter and their relationship underdeterminate and contingent on...