Metin M Cosgel
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 332682 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Metin M Cosgel |
| NOMBRES | Metin M |
| APELLIDO | Cosgel |
| FIRMA | COSGEL M M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1249-1535 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 86 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Intergenerational mobility in Ottoman Istanbul
Using more than 266,000 Ottoman court-register observations spanning 1513–1884, we measure intergenerational mobility in Istanbul over nearly four centuries. Honorific titles, validated against probate wealth records, provide our measure of socioeconomic status. Persistence in title status follows a fall–rise–fall pattern. It declined as the devşirme levy and competition for admission to religious schools brought outsiders into the ruling class. …
Gender and justice
This paper studies legal disparities between men and women in a patriarchal framework. Throughout history, women have confronted discrimination in matters of inheritance, property ownership, and various other legal rights. We examine the consequences of legal discrimination for women's differential engagement and success within legal conflicts, using data from Ottoman courts in the early nineteenth century. The results show that women were partie…
Judiciary and Wealth in the Ottoman Empire, 1689–1843
This article examines the accumulation, temporal variation, and inequality of wealth in the Ottoman judiciary between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using information from the estate inventories, we calculate the gross and net wealth of judges at the time of death. Comparisons against contemporary economic indicators show low to moderate levels of wealth accumulation among the judiciary. Wealth levels varied significantly ac…
Toward an Economic Theory of Religious Belief and the Emergence of Law
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
The Ottoman Empire
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Law and Economics” Literature and Ottoman Legal Studies
This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the “law and economics” literature regarding settlement-trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the “selection principle” and “50 percent plaintiff win-rate” formulated by George Priest and Benjamin Klein. The article also demonstrates how existing research based on Ottoman court records can contribute to the “law and economics” scholars…
Dispute Resolution in Ottoman Courts
Since the emergence of the Weberian notion of “kadijustiz” scholars have debated the ability of Islamic courts to resolve disputes fairly and predictably. For a quantitative analysis of how these courts resolved disputes, we use data from the court records (sicils) of the Ottoman town of Kastamonu and examine whether the judges’ decision followed systematic patterns and whether the patterns were logical. The results show that the trial outcome wa…
The selection bias in court records
Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied…
A temporal analysis of wealth in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu
This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally declined over the course of the century. Our analysis also suggests that the economic conditions of poor men, if not women, deteriorated more so than those o…
Political Legitimacy and Technology Adoption
A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it negatively affects an agent's ability to provide the ruler legitimacy. However, when other sources of legitimacy emerge, the ruler will accept the technology …
Inequality of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire
This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories ( tereke s) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 …
Crime and Punishment in Ottoman Times
Ruling for more than six centuries over lands that spanned three continents, the Ottomans developed a system of law enforcement that initially relied on fines collected by local agents. In the sixteenth century, much of the revenue from these fines went to the local officials in charge of identifying suspects and punishing criminals. To prevent corruption, the personnel responsible for adjudicating criminals were not also responsible for punishin…
The political economy of Ottoman public debt
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for …
Estimating Rural Incomes and Inequality in the Ottoman Empire
Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri , arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized i…
Taxes, efficiency, and redistribution
Risk, Transaction Costs, and Tax Assignment
Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this article we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. Although the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth-century O…
Efficiency and Continuity in Public Finance
Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new tr…
Ottoman Tax Registers ( Tahrir Defterleri )
The Ottoman government obtained current information on the empire's sources of revenue through periodic registers called tahrir defterleri. These documents include detailed information on taxpaying subjects and taxable resources, making it possible to study the economic and social history of the Middle East and eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the use of these documents has been typically limited to the constructi…
Religious Identity and Consumption
Consumption choices assist in solving the problem of how to convey and recognize religious identities. In the communication of an identity, individuals use the knowledge embedded in consumption norms, which restrict the range of choices to a smaller set and abbreviate the required knowledge for encoding and decoding messages. Using this knowledge as a shared framework for understanding, individuals with religious beliefs can choose consumption it…
Membership in a Religious Commune
The Commitment Process in a Religious Commune
Focusing on the Shakers and using census data, this paper quantitatively examines influences on religious commitment and the way these influences differed between new and veteran members. Whereas personal characteristics (age, sex, nativity, and occupation) were the primary sources of influence on the commitment of veteran members, new recruits were also influenced by interpersonal and organizational factors (kinship ties, social bonds, and membe…
The Family in Utopia
The Shakers sought to replace the nuclear family with the Shaker family through their unorthodox family practices of celibacy and communal child rearing. Although these practices may have been beneficial in some respects, they contributed to the numerical decline of the Shakers. A quantitative analysis of the children (joined with parents or adopted by the society) in Shaker communities between 1850 and 1870 shows that children with natural famil…
Between God and Market
By our late-twentieth-century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well-established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of microsocialist economies that, internally at least, did not use prices to allocate resources, allowed for little private property for participants, and provided a constant return to labor independent of eff…
The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective
Research Article| June 01 1998 The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective: A Reply to Fontaine Metin M. Coşgel Metin M. Coşgel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1998) 30 (2): 285–287. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-30-2-285 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Metin M. Coşgel; The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective: A Reply to Fontai…
Religious Identity and Consumption
Consumption choices assist in solving the problem of how to convey and recognize religious identities. In the communication of an identity, individuals use the knowledge embedded in consumption norms, which restrict the range of choices to a smaller set and abbreviate the required knowledge for encoding and decoding messages. Using this knowledge as a shared framework for understanding, individuals with religious beliefs can choose consumption it…
Efficiency and Continuity in Public Finance
Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new tr…
Inequality of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire
This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories ( tereke s) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 …
Taxes, efficiency, and redistribution
Ottoman Tax Registers ( Tahrir Defterleri )
The Ottoman government obtained current information on the empire's sources of revenue through periodic registers called tahrir defterleri. These documents include detailed information on taxpaying subjects and taxable resources, making it possible to study the economic and social history of the Middle East and eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the use of these documents has been typically limited to the constructi…
Religious Culture and Economic Performance
The farming practices of the Amish have differed in various ways from those of other farmers. I use the information from federal census schedules to examine the differences during the period 1850 to 1880 in light of Amish culture. Amish farmers did not resist technological change during 1850–80, but the evidence shows other systematic differences. They adopted distinct patterns in investment to ensure the survival of their religious culture, whic…
Crime and Punishment in Ottoman Times
Ruling for more than six centuries over lands that spanned three continents, the Ottomans developed a system of law enforcement that initially relied on fines collected by local agents. In the sixteenth century, much of the revenue from these fines went to the local officials in charge of identifying suspects and punishing criminals. To prevent corruption, the personnel responsible for adjudicating criminals were not also responsible for punishin…
Risk, Transaction Costs, and Tax Assignment
Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this article we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. Although the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth-century O…
Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics
Research Article| March 01 1996 Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics Metin M. Coşgel Metin M. Coşgel 1 Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1996) 28 (1): 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-28-1-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Metin M. Coşgel; Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics. History o…
Consumption Institutions
Consumption institutions reflect socially constructed systems of rules that generate regularities in people's consumption behavior. This paper seeks to understand these institutions by using insights from recent developments in rhetorical analysis and the economics of institutions in order to develop an analogy between speech and consumption and to explore parallels between the institutions that surround them. Just as a speaker utilizes speech in…
A temporal analysis of wealth in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu
This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally declined over the course of the century. Our analysis also suggests that the economic conditions of poor men, if not women, deteriorated more so than those o…
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for …
Law and Economics” Literature and Ottoman Legal Studies
This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the “law and economics” literature regarding settlement-trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the “selection principle” and “50 percent plaintiff win-rate” formulated by George Priest and Benjamin Klein. The article also demonstrates how existing research based on Ottoman court records can contribute to the “law and economics” scholars…
Estimating Rural Incomes and Inequality in the Ottoman Empire
Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri , arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized i…
Organization and Distributional Equality in a Network of Communes
A distinctive feature of the Shaker organization of communes was to divide each commune into economically independent subdivisions called "Families." Although the sharing of wealth and egalitarian distribution of output were integral aspects of Shaker religious practice, the organization of their communes based on the Family system led to inequalities among Families. The data from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 US Census enumeration schedules show that…
Gender and justice
This paper studies legal disparities between men and women in a patriarchal framework. Throughout history, women have confronted discrimination in matters of inheritance, property ownership, and various other legal rights. We examine the consequences of legal discrimination for women's differential engagement and success within legal conflicts, using data from Ottoman courts in the early nineteenth century. The results show that women were partie…
The selection bias in court records
Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied…
The Commitment Process in a Religious Commune
Focusing on the Shakers and using census data, this paper quantitatively examines influences on religious commitment and the way these influences differed between new and veteran members. Whereas personal characteristics (age, sex, nativity, and occupation) were the primary sources of influence on the commitment of veteran members, new recruits were also influenced by interpersonal and organizational factors (kinship ties, social bonds, and membe…
The Family in Utopia
The Shakers sought to replace the nuclear family with the Shaker family through their unorthodox family practices of celibacy and communal child rearing. Although these practices may have been beneficial in some respects, they contributed to the numerical decline of the Shakers. A quantitative analysis of the children (joined with parents or adopted by the society) in Shaker communities between 1850 and 1870 shows that children with natural famil…
Productivity of a Commune
Focusing on a religious commune known as the Shakers and utilizing the information recorded in the enumeration schedules of the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture censuses, this article estimates the productivities of Shaker enterprises and compares them with those of other producers randomly selected from the same data source. The results provide support to the contention that communes need not always suffer from reduced productivity. Shaker far…
Scattering and Contracts in Medieval Agriculture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Religious Culture and Economic Performance
The farming practices of the Amish have differed in various ways from those of other farmers. I use the information from federal census schedules to examine the differences during the period 1850 to 1880 in light of Amish culture. Amish farmers did not resist technological change during 1850–80, but the evidence shows other systematic differences. They adopted distinct patterns in investment to ensure the survival of their religious culture, whic…
Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics
Research Article| March 01 1996 Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics Metin M. Coşgel Metin M. Coşgel 1 Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1996) 28 (1): 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-28-1-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Metin M. Coşgel; Metaphors, Stories, and the Entrepreneur in Economics. History o…
Consumption Institutions
Consumption institutions reflect socially constructed systems of rules that generate regularities in people's consumption behavior. This paper seeks to understand these institutions by using insights from recent developments in rhetorical analysis and the economics of institutions in order to develop an analogy between speech and consumption and to explore parallels between the institutions that surround them. Just as a speaker utilizes speech in…
Organization and Distributional Equality in a Network of Communes
A distinctive feature of the Shaker organization of communes was to divide each commune into economically independent subdivisions called "Families." Although the sharing of wealth and egalitarian distribution of output were integral aspects of Shaker religious practice, the organization of their communes based on the Family system led to inequalities among Families. The data from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 US Census enumeration schedules show that…
The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective
Research Article| June 01 1998 The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective: A Reply to Fontaine Metin M. Coşgel Metin M. Coşgel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1998) 30 (2): 285–287. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-30-2-285 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Metin M. Coşgel; The Power of the Rhetorical Perspective: A Reply to Fontai…
Productivity of a Commune
Focusing on a religious commune known as the Shakers and utilizing the information recorded in the enumeration schedules of the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture censuses, this article estimates the productivities of Shaker enterprises and compares them with those of other producers randomly selected from the same data source. The results provide support to the contention that communes need not always suffer from reduced productivity. Shaker far…
Between God and Market
By our late-twentieth-century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well-established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of microsocialist economies that, internally at least, did not use prices to allocate resources, allowed for little private property for participants, and provided a constant return to labor independent of eff…
The Family in Utopia
The Shakers sought to replace the nuclear family with the Shaker family through their unorthodox family practices of celibacy and communal child rearing. Although these practices may have been beneficial in some respects, they contributed to the numerical decline of the Shakers. A quantitative analysis of the children (joined with parents or adopted by the society) in Shaker communities between 1850 and 1870 shows that children with natural famil…
Membership in a Religious Commune
The Commitment Process in a Religious Commune
Focusing on the Shakers and using census data, this paper quantitatively examines influences on religious commitment and the way these influences differed between new and veteran members. Whereas personal characteristics (age, sex, nativity, and occupation) were the primary sources of influence on the commitment of veteran members, new recruits were also influenced by interpersonal and organizational factors (kinship ties, social bonds, and membe…
Ottoman Tax Registers ( Tahrir Defterleri )
The Ottoman government obtained current information on the empire's sources of revenue through periodic registers called tahrir defterleri. These documents include detailed information on taxpaying subjects and taxable resources, making it possible to study the economic and social history of the Middle East and eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the use of these documents has been typically limited to the constructi…
Religious Identity and Consumption
Consumption choices assist in solving the problem of how to convey and recognize religious identities. In the communication of an identity, individuals use the knowledge embedded in consumption norms, which restrict the range of choices to a smaller set and abbreviate the required knowledge for encoding and decoding messages. Using this knowledge as a shared framework for understanding, individuals with religious beliefs can choose consumption it…
Risk, Transaction Costs, and Tax Assignment
Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this article we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. Although the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth-century O…
Efficiency and Continuity in Public Finance
Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new tr…
Taxes, efficiency, and redistribution
Estimating Rural Incomes and Inequality in the Ottoman Empire
Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri , arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized i…
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for …
The political economy of Ottoman public debt
Political Legitimacy and Technology Adoption
A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it negatively affects an agent's ability to provide the ruler legitimacy. However, when other sources of legitimacy emerge, the ruler will accept the technology …
Inequality of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire
This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories ( tereke s) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 …
Crime and Punishment in Ottoman Times
Ruling for more than six centuries over lands that spanned three continents, the Ottomans developed a system of law enforcement that initially relied on fines collected by local agents. In the sixteenth century, much of the revenue from these fines went to the local officials in charge of identifying suspects and punishing criminals. To prevent corruption, the personnel responsible for adjudicating criminals were not also responsible for punishin…
A temporal analysis of wealth in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu
This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally declined over the course of the century. Our analysis also suggests that the economic conditions of poor men, if not women, deteriorated more so than those o…
Law and Economics” Literature and Ottoman Legal Studies
This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the “law and economics” literature regarding settlement-trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the “selection principle” and “50 percent plaintiff win-rate” formulated by George Priest and Benjamin Klein. The article also demonstrates how existing research based on Ottoman court records can contribute to the “law and economics” scholars…
Dispute Resolution in Ottoman Courts
Since the emergence of the Weberian notion of “kadijustiz” scholars have debated the ability of Islamic courts to resolve disputes fairly and predictably. For a quantitative analysis of how these courts resolved disputes, we use data from the court records (sicils) of the Ottoman town of Kastamonu and examine whether the judges’ decision followed systematic patterns and whether the patterns were logical. The results show that the trial outcome wa…
Economics (23 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (15 obras) · History (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · History (9 obras) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (7 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras)