Mortgage markets in developing economies are often confined to private networks. Inadequate registration of property rights has been blamed for this, but it is questionable whether registration provides a simple and complete solution. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the Low...

This article examines the Dutch medical marketplace between 1650 and 1900 from a household’s perspective, based on the probate inventories database of the Meertens Institute. It offers the first quantitative analysis of demand for medical care in small towns and villages across the...

Building on recent work by Collins et al. this paper aims to explain the failure of corporate and public initiatives to alleviate poverty before the twentieth century by unravelling the financial rationale behind the various combinations of private efforts, family and neighbourhood help,...

Applying insights from recent literature on the financial behaviour of poor households in developing countries to the nineteenth-century Netherlands, we show that micro finance type institutions failed to alleviate the country¡¯s persistent poverty for the same reasons found today. The...