作者：University College Dublin; INRAE
摘要：How-and how well-do food markets function in famine conditions? The controversy surrounding this question may benefit from historical perspective. Here we study two massive famines that struck France between 1693 and 17 10, killing over two million people. In both cases the impact of harvest failure was exacerbated by wartime demands on the food supply; we ask whether the crises were exacerbated yet further by a failure of markets to function as they did in normal times. The evidence, we concl...
作者：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
作者：Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
作者：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
作者：University of Arizona; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The weather-information problem faced by settlers of semi-arid regions of the Great Plains hindered their attempts to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes. Episodes of homestead settlement and collapse in western Kansas in 1893-1894 and in eastern Montana in 1917-1921 are examined. A Bayesian learning model indicates how new climate information was incrementally incorporated to revise views of agricultural prospects. Primary data show homesteaders' lagged response to new drought infor...
