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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments. This is a revised version of the paper originally written January 1992. Terms of use: Documents inResearch for this paper was supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Duetscher Akademischer Austaustdienst, the Economic History Association, the National Science Foundation (SES-9209685) and Princeton University.We thank Ben Bemanke, William English, Ronald I. Miller, Jonathan Morduch, Andrei Shleifer and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper illustrates a method for discriminating between alternative theories using data from German credit cooperatives from the nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany. We build a model of credit cooperatives designed to provide monitoring incentives and test this using nineteenth century data.

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many as eight children each, and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive. Today, many women have no children at all, and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes is zero or even negative. This paper discusses the large literature on the historical fertility transition, focusing on what we do and do not know about the process. I stress some possible misunderstanding of the demographic literature, and discuss an agenda for future work. (JEL I12, J13, N30)

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Banks play a greater role in the German financial system than in those of the United States or Britain. Germany's large universal banks are admired by those who advocate bank deregulation in the United States. Others admire the universal banks for their supposed role in corporate governance and industrial finance. Many discussions distort the German banking system by overstressing one of several types of banks, and ignore the competition and cooperation between the famous universal banks and other banking groups. Tracing the historical development of the German banking system from the early nineteenth century places the large universal banks in context.

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The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. This paper uses district-level data from Bavaria to study the correlates of the decline of fertility in that German kingdom in the nineteenth century. Bavaria's fertility transition was later and less dramatic than in other parts of Germany. Our results for Bavaria indicate that the European Fertility Project was right about the role of religion and secularization, but missed an important role for the economic and structural effects stressed by economic historians.