We study risk behavior of Danish self-employed entrepreneurs, whose income risk may be driven by both exogenous factors and effort choice (moral hazard). Partial insurance is available through voluntary unemployment insurance (UI). Additional incentives to sign insurance contracts stem from a...

This paper exploits microdata from parish registers in a rural Tuscan village to trace the relationship between experienced and expected child mortality on household fertility strategies. It turns out that spacing of births and hence completed fertility are not only linked to economic risks and...

Over the 400 years covered by this study European grain markets became increasingly integrated as measured by the speed of adjustment back to equilibrium after a shock. Market integration smoothened local supply shocks and therefore generated price stability which can be seen as having a...

This paper argues that the appropriate standard for the analysis of commodity market integration is the transport cost adjusted law of one price. A threshold error correction model that incorporates that property is developed and applied to French wheat prices in the 19th century. This type of...

This article looks at the gains from improved market efficiency in long-distance grain trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, when violations of the law of one price were reduced due to improved information transmission. Two markets, a major export centre, Chicago, and a major...