Abstract We study how European immigrants to the United States influenced the formation of productivity-enhancing cooperatives—the cow-testing associations (CTAs)—which were imported to the US by a Danish immigrant. We hypothesize that Danish immigrant communities were important to their formation by transferring knowledge of the cooperative to dairy farming communities. Using novel data on CTAs, we find evidence that counties with higher influxes of Danes between 1880 and 1900 were more likely to form CTAs. While other immigrant groups were familiar with cooperatives, we only find Danish immigrants to be important, suggesting that familiarity with this specific institution was important to formation.
Alian et al. (Wed,) studied this question.