Agricultural cooperation is seen as a way to solve collective action problems and has been associated with high social capital and other beneficial impacts in the countryside beyond productivity increases. But what if it comes into conflict with existing private concerns? The Irish dairy...

The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852), even as other measures of educational attainment improved. We show how demography partly accounts for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to...

The relative success of the Danish and failure of the Irish dairy industries before the First World War is often contrasted given their competition for the lucrative British butter market. The traditional narrative implicitly assumes that Ireland failed because it was unsuccessful at adopting...

The rapid spread of the Danish dairy cooperatives from the 1880s until the First World War is often portrayed as a uniform wave which swept the country. We investigate this using exceptionally detailed micro-level panel data taken from the Operational Statistics of Creameries, which were...

Pawnbroking, one of the oldest and most accessible forms of credit, was a common feature of life in pre-famine and famine Ireland. This paper studies the role of pawnbroking in the Irish financial system during this important period, applying insights from modern studies on fringe banking to...