By examining the acts of the Public Notary of Haifa (1890–1915), this article shows that it was the traditional informal market of credit, run by local notables, which financially supported the development of the small-landholding-based agricultural sector of the Haifa district in late Ottoman Palestine. In seeking to ascertain what led to the success of the informal rural credit market as compared with the formal credit market, the article finds that the local notables, who acted as financial intermediaries for small landholders, enjoyed an information advantage over the banks stemming from the establishment of interlinked credit market transactions connected to the stipulation of bay' wafā, salam and muzara‘ah contracts. In a context of land privatisation and growing commercialisation of agriculture, these contracts became the instruments used by notables to invest in peasants' landholdings and to manage a sales network for agricultural products on a local and international scale, hence representing an efficient financial institution to support the ‘agricultural export-led growth’ of late Ottoman Palestine.

On the basis of a novel dataset, the article investigates the anatomy of financial crises in Norway from 1830 to 2010. First, nine significant crises are identified. Second, the article examines spillover effects on the real economy. We find a clear but not symmetric relationship. Third, the article investigates key patterns in credit and money volumes. Major financial crises typically occurred after substantial money and credit expansion, causing financial instability.

The granting of a £7,000m bilateral loan by the British government to the Republic of Ireland in October 2010 highlights the banking co-dependence of modern Anglo-Irish relations. This article provides a Bank-of-England-centred perspective on the development of Irish monetary institutions from the granting of Irish monetary independence in December 1921 to the establishment of the Central Bank of Ireland in 1943. Irrespective of unresolved Anglo-Irish political issues, the Bank of England's Irish policy during this period was based on a strict adherence to Montagu Norman's key central banking principles of co-operation, exclusiveness and political autonomy. This article identifies that the application of these principles survived both the coming to power of Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) in Southern Ireland in 1932 and the outbreak of war in 1939. This article also argues that Norman's adherence to a wider internationalist view of monetary relations played an important role in forcing the overwhelmingly Protestant and pro-union Irish commercial banks, headed by the Bank of Ireland, to come to terms with the reality of Irish monetary independence. In this context, Norman's approach to Southern Ireland parallels the transition from Empire to Commonwealth, which began to emerge in the interwar period.

This article examines the impact of organizational structure on risk taking across different lines of property insurance (fire, marine, vehicle and specialized property insurance) in Sweden from 1913 to 1939. Based on the theoretical arguments whereby the mutual organizational form has a competitive advantage in underwriting homogeneous but unknown risk distribution, while the stock organizational form is more likely to underwrite more volatile and heterogeneous risk categories, we conclude that organizational form has a significant impact on risk taking. Our empirical analysis shows that the risk taking, measured as incurred claims to anticipated losses, was on average lower among mutual insurers. When comparing across lines of insurance, the analysis shows that the mutual form was more successful in keeping down risks in fire and marine, while less so in vehicle and specialized property insurance. Stock companies mitigated the higher risk by ceding more premiums to reinsurers and by diversifying more across different lines of insurance.