IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/207.html

Rural Transformation, Inequality, and the Origins of Microfinance

Author

Listed:
  • Suesse, Marvin

    (Trinity College Dublin)

  • Wolf, Nikolaus

    (HU Berlin and CEPR)

Abstract

What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit cooperatives in the 236 eastern counties of Prussia between 1852 and 1913. This setting is attractive as it provides a free market benchmark scenario without public ownership, subsidization, or direct regulatory intervention. Furthermore, we exploit features of our historical set-up to identify causal effects. The results show that declining agricultural staple prices, as a feature of structural transformation, leads to the emergence of credit cooperatives. Similarly, declining bank lending rates contribute to their rise. Low asset sizes and land inequality inhibit the regional spread of cooperatives, while ethnic heterogeneity has ambiguous effects. We also offer empirical evidence suggesting that credit cooperatives accelerated rural transformation by diversifying farm outputs.

Suggested Citation

  • Suesse, Marvin & Wolf, Nikolaus, 2019. "Rural Transformation, Inequality, and the Origins of Microfinance," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 207, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:207
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/207.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Bräuer, Richard & Hungerland, Wolf-Fabian & Kersting, Felix, 2021. "Trade Shocks, Labor Markets and Elections in the First Globalization," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 285, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    3. Hartarska, Valentina M. & Zhang, Jingfang & Nadolnyak, Denis A., 2023. "Scope Economies from Rural and Urban Microfinance Services," 2023 Annual Meeting, July 23-25, Washington D.C. 335439, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    4. Nikolaus Wolf, 2021. "Deutschland in der ersten Globalisierung," Wirtschaftsdienst, Springer;ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 101(4), pages 254-258, April.
    5. Qingqing Yang & Yanhui Gao & Xinjun Yang & Jian Zhang, 2022. "Rural Transformation Driven by Households’ Adaptation to Climate, Policy, Market, and Urbanization: Perspectives from Livelihoods–Land Use on Chinese Loess Plateau," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-23, July.
    6. repec:ags:aaea22:335439 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Deininger,Klaus W. & Ali,Daniel Ayalew, 2022. "How Urban Land Titling and Registry Reform Affect Land and Credit Markets : Evidencefrom Lesotho," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10043, The World Bank.
    8. Maanik Nath, 2022. "Credit risk in colonial India," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 75(2), pages 396-420, May.
    9. Alexander Donges & Jean-Marie Meier & Rui C. Silva, 2023. "The Impact of Institutions on Innovation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(4), pages 1951-1974, April.
    10. Rongtian Zhang & Xiaolin Zhang, 2022. "Spatial–Temporal Differentiation and the Driving Mechanism of Rural Transformation Development in the Yangtze River Economic Belt," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(5), pages 1-16, February.
    11. Valentina Hartarska & Jingfang Zhang & Denis A. Nadolnyak, 2023. "Scope economies from rural and urban microfinance services," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 89(4), pages 1138-1167, April.
    12. Kersting, Felix & Wohnsiedler, Iris & Wolf, Nikolaus, 2020. "Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(3), pages 710-745, September.
    13. Suesse, Marvin & Grigoriadis, Theocharis, 2025. "Financing Late Industrialization: Evidence from the State Bank of the Russian Empire," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 85(4), pages 1170-1206, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • N23 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:207. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.