The most common business enterprise form in Germany today is the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH). The GmbH offers entrepreneurs the partnership’s flexibility combined with limited liability, capital lock-in, and other traits associated with corporations. Earlier enterprise forms such as the partnership and corporation were codified versions of longstanding practice; the GmbH, on the other hand, was the lawgiver’s creation. Authorized in 1892, the GmbH appeared during a period of ferment in German enterprise law and was an early example of the “Private Limited-Liability Company” (PLLC) prevalent in many economies today. This paper traces the debates and the legislative process that led to the GmbH’s introduction. The new form reflected challenges created by the corporation reform of 1884, problems in German colonial companies, and the view that British company law had put German firms at a competitive disadvantage. Many new enterprises adopted the GmbH, but significant sections of the financial and legal community harbored strong reservations about this legal innovation.
The first modern German cooperatives began operations in the 1840s and faced, among other challenges, unfriendly legal rules. In Prussia, cooperatives experienced official harassment as allies of the then-oppositional Liberals. More importantly, cooperatives lacked the right to act as bodies, forcing them to engage in expensive legal workarounds for simple tasks such as contracting debts. The first German cooperatives law, Prussia’s 1867 Act, made clear the cooperatives had a right to exist and gave them the right to act as entities. Further development in the cooperative movement exposed flaws in the original act. The 1889 (Reich) Cooperatives Act legalized some organizational differences in the newer, rural cooperatives, and introduced compulsory external audits for cooperatives. Most famously, the 1889 Act first allowed cooperatives with limited liability, a step that made German cooperatives more similar to those elsewhere in Europe. The historical literature on cooperatives has neglected two important parts of this story: problems with the way unlimited liability operated under the 1867 Act, and the close connection between cooperative and company law.
(Edited with William A. Sundstrom, and Warren C. Whatley) Combining theoretical work with careful historical description and analysis of new data sources, History Matters makes a strong case for a more historical approach to economics, both by argument and by example. Seventeen original essays, written by distinguished economists and economic historians, use economic theory and historical cases to explore how and why “history matters.”
The chapters, which range in subject matter from the economic theory of irreversible investment to the nineteenth-century decline in U.S. rural fertility to the English poor law reform, are unified by three themes. The first explores the significance, causes, and consequences of path dependence in the evolution of technology and institutions. The second relates to the ways in which economic and political behavior are profoundly shaped and constrained by the cultural and political context inherited from history at a particular point in time. The final theme demonstrates the importance of integrating economic theory into historical research in the gathering and interpretation of data.
Awarded the Donald Murphy Prize of the American Conference for Irish Studies for 1999 — In the years between the Great Famine of the 1840s and the First World War, Ireland experienced a drastic drop in population: the percentage of adults who never married soared from 10 percent to 25 percent, while the overall population decreased by one third. What accounted for this? For many social analysts, the history of post-Famine Irish depopulation was a Malthusian morality tale where declining living standards led young people to postpone marriage out of concern for their ability to support a family. The problem here, argues Timothy Guinnane, is that living standards in post-Famine Ireland did not decline. Rather, other, more subtle economic changes influenced the decision to delay marriage or not marry at all. In this engaging inquiry into the “vanishing Irish,” Guinnane explores the options that presented themselves to Ireland’s younger generations, taking into account household structure, inheritance, religion, cultural influences on marriage and family life, and especially emigration.
Guinnane focuses on rural Ireland, where the population changes were most profound, and explores the way the demographic patterns reflect the rural Irish economy, Ireland’s place as a small part in a much larger English-speaking world, and the influence of earlier Irish history and culture. Particular effort is made to compare Irish demographic behavior to similar patterns elsewhere in Europe, revealing an Ireland anchored in European tradition and yet a distinctive society in its own right.