Famine and Finance

The book uses archival data to examine how access to micro-finance credit played a role in facilitating adjustment to blight during the Great Famine of Ireland.

The author argues that the worst affected districts with a microfinance fund experienced substantially smaller population declines and larger increases in buffer livestock during the famine than those districts without a fund. The potentially limited capacity of credit access to mitigate the effects of a major environmental shock on the poorest, most vulnerable borrowers is also a key topic of discussion.

Auteur
Tyler Beck Goodspeed is Junior Research Fellow in Economics at St John's College, Oxford University, UK. He was awarded his BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, USA, and his MPhil from Cambridge University, UK, where he was a Gates Scholar.

Texte du rabat
parts of chapters 2 and 3, and 4 have also been published in companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and the World Bank Economic Review.