"From 1716 to 1845, the Scottish financial system functioned with no official central bank or lender of last resort, no public (or private) monopoly on currency issuance, no legal reserve requirements, and no formal limits on bank size. In support of previous research on Scottish "free banking,"...

From 1716 to 1845 Scottish banks were among the most dynamic and resilient in Europe, effectively absorbing economic shocks that rocked markets in London and on the continent. Tyler Beck Goodspeed explains the paradox that Scotland’s banking system achieved this success without the regulations...

I study the effects of a major environmental shock on microfinance lending by analyzing the Irish Loan Funds during the Great Famine of Ireland. I find that funds in districts worse affected by blight experienced higher failure rates and greater credit retrenchment and flight-to-quality than...

The book uses archival data to examine how access to micro-finance credit played a role in facilitating adjustment to blight during the Great Famine of Ireland. The author argues that the worst affected districts with a microfinance fund experienced substantially smaller population declines and...

While standard accounts of the 1930s debates surrounding economic thought pit John Maynard Keynes against Friedrich von Hayek in a clash of ideology, this reflexive dichotomy is in many respects superficial. It is the argument of this book that both Keynes and Hayek developed their respective...