Research
I am an economic historian and a historical economist, and my work addresses problems in business and financial history. I am an expert on the interwar history of the low countries. One goal of my work is to show how policymakers can learn from the academic study of the past.
I am currently preparing the papers which constituted my PhD thesis for journal submissions, and am also working on a number of co-authored projects which relate directly to this research.
One new research project that I am preparing concerns patents and innovation. Dutch history offers a unique case with which to explore the processes, direction and importance of invention without intellectual property rights as the Netherlands abolished its patent system in 1869 and only reintroduced it in 1912.
PhD thesis
Religion, competition and liability: Dutch cooperative banking in crisis, 1919-1927
What accounts for the differences in the performance of cooperatively-owned banks in the Dutch financial crisis of the early 1920s? This thesis measures and explains the (relative) performance of Dutch rural Raiffeisen banks (boerenleenbanken) and urban Schulze-Delitzsch banks (middenstandsbanken) during the Netherlands' interwar banking crisis by applying various economic methods to new historical evidence. The thesis asks: (1) what were the effects on risk-taking behaviour of differences in the religious attitudes of bankers and their customers? (2) what was the relationship between interbank competition and financial stability? and (3) what was the consequence of the liability choices made by shareholders for their banks' continued survival? Using a combination of economic theory, quantitative financial analysis and qualitative business histories, this thesis finds that: (1) banks serving small religious groups were less willing, despite being more able, to take on risks than those serving majority denominations; (2) those banks that were subject to the lowest competitive pressures enjoyed the most liquid investment portfolios; and (3) the choice of liability limitation available to bankers influenced their balance sheet risks, for the worse. Together, these findings lead to the conclusion that social, organisational and institutional factors each explain part of the heterogeneity in the fate of the Netherlands' cooperative banks during a period which includes unprecedented debt-deflationary financial turmoil: hence, (1) strict membership criteria and the use of personal guarantors in loan agreements acted as strong devices to allow banks for minorities, regardless of their denomination, to screen and monitor their customers; (2) the switching costs associated with religious affiliation resulted in a competition-stability tradeoff during periods of extreme distress; and (3) the stakeholders of the banks which failed were probably less risk-averse than those of banks which did not, the consequence of endogenous group formation by type of risk.
Keywords
Cooperative banking; historical microfinance; financial crises; religious business and risk-taking; competition and financial stability; liability and bank survival; the Netherlands; interwar financial history
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Current research
What made it possible for imitations of Raiffeisen's cooperative rural microfinance model to work well in some European countries, but fail in others?
The analysis of anthropometric data on Irish prison inmates allows us to quantify the effects of nineteenth century penal reforms.
Between 1869 and 1912, inventors in the Kingdom enjoyed no legal protection for their inventions. Yet this was the period in which the country experienced its Industrial Revolution, having largely missed the first one. The Dutch case is a very useful quasi-natural experiment with which to explore the two traditional arguments for patent protection and the Boldrin & Levine (2008) critique thereof.
How does shareholder liability affect the performance of banks during financial crises?