Featured Researcher: Timothy Guinnane

Timothy Guinnane was elected to the NBER's Board of Directors this fall to represent the Economic History Association. He is the Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economic History at Yale University.

Guinnane received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1988. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2000-1 and the Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge in 2002-3. During 2007-8 he will be a Fellow at the Center for Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Guinnane's early research concerned demographic change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Ireland. His demographic interests continue, and he is currently working on projects that deal with the fertility transition in Ireland and in Germany. Another interest is the problem of credit for poor people and how such lending has been organized in the past. He has written about the role of small-loan lenders in the United States in the early twentieth century as well as the cooperative credit systems that emerged in Germany and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. His most recent project matches three centuries of demographic and household-inventory data for the German kingdom of Wurttemberg, prior to World War I. This project aims to answer basic questions about when household began to accumulate assets, and when, and so address a central puzzle in the process of industrialization in the past.