Information Acquisition in Antebellum U.S. Credit Markets: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Credit Reports

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Brennecke
2008 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-454
Author(s):  
Juliette Levy

Abstract This article addresses how marital property regimes acted as obstacles to the development of the Yucatán credit market. Marriage is a contract, and historically it carries with it significant financial corollaries. Dowries, marital property regimes, and inheritance laws were all designed to support the economic instrument that marriage represented. There are many other ways in which marriage intersects with markets; this article assesses the role of property rights, and specifically, married women’s property rights, in the credit markets of nineteenth-century Yucatán. Using mortgage contracts and probate records recorded by notaries, this article analyzes the participation of women in the local mortgage market, taking into account the legal context in which it developed, and explains how legal tradition and civil codes contributed to the distortions that affected women in the local credit market. This article shows specifically that the analysis of women’s participation in economic markets in the nineteenth century must take their marital status into account, as well as the unequal legal position of husbands and wives under the laws of the time, and concludes that marital property rights, and by extension marriage, played an important and unexpected role in the region’s credit market.


2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Levy

Little is known about the logic of lending transactions and the development of credit markets in Mexico, or the rest of Latin America, prior to banks. We know even less about what role financial intermediaries played in these pre-banking markets, or who these intermediaries were. This article analyzes the intermediary role notaries played in the long-term credit market in Yucatan, in southeastern Mexico, in the nineteenth-century. Using a unique dataset of mortgages from the notarial records in the Yucatan state archive, the article shows that, in the absence of banks, notaries facilitated access to credit, and that, in the institutional and political context of Yucatan, both entrepreneurship and monopoly were being fostered.


Author(s):  
Philip T. Hoffman ◽  
Gilles Postel-Vinay ◽  
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution's impact on credit markets and the long-term implications for lending. It begins with the revolution's fundamental institutional reforms, which shaped credit markets for the rest of the nineteenth century. The chapter analyzes the effect of the reforms and the consequences of the revolutionary inflation—this entails looking at how borrowers and lenders reacted, both in the short and long run. It also involves examining shifts in their demand for notaries' services, whether to draw up contracts if clients were illiterate, or to secure loans with collateral. Finally, the chapter examines the difficulty that borrowers and lenders had in the peer-to-peer matching markets where only a few loans were made each month.


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