A complicated puzzle: spinsters, widows and credit in Sweden (1790–1910)

This article aims to retrace the extent of single women's engagement in the credit market. To this end, it relies on a series of more than 1,900 probate inventories drawn up between 1790 and 1910 in the two Swedish cities of Gävle and Uppsala. These two cities represent an ideal case study, because the process of industrialisation and economic development resulted in two differently structured credit markets. The research centres initially on the problem of studying women's agency from probate inventories. It analyses the main characteristics of spinsters and widows as they emerge from the sources and compares them with married women. Subsequently, the article analyses how marital status shaped women's economic lives, affecting how they participated in the credit market. For this purpose, it focuses specifically on banking and peer-to-peer exchanges (in particular, promissory notes). Spinsters favoured more conservative strategies relying more often on the services provided by banks, while widows seemed to have played an additional, and more significant, role as lenders in peer-to-peer networks. The study also confirms that unmarried women were only rarely active as borrowers.

Credit and Financial Capital in Roman Egypt

Roman Egypt sets an example of a monetized society in which credit was widely used in both monetary and in-kind transactions. During the first two and a half centuries of Roman rule, interactions between the three main legal systems in Egypt—Demotic, Greek, and Roman—gradually created a coherent institutional environment that structured credit and financial capital. In this environment, Greek law gained the upper hand as the most frequently used system of law for conducting economic interactions. The administrative, fiscal, and financial conditions set up by Roman governance, and above all the new and reduced maximum Roman legal interest rate, affected the development of credit-related mechanisms. Legal structures that enabled the creation of credit went through a slow and gradual change, in which available legal formats were adjusted to accommodate for somewhat different activities. Παραθήκη‎ formulae, originally used for making deposits, increasingly were being used in de facto loans, thereby casting new content in an existing formula. While this practice is commonly attested in transactions between private individuals, using παραθήκη‎ agreements seems not to have served as a common financial tool for Roman Egypt’s banking sector.

Syndicated Credit as a Structured Credit Product (Book Review: Popkova, L. A. Legal Construction of Syndicated Credit [Text] : Monograph / L. A. Popkova. – Moscow : Prospect, 2018. – 160 p.)

The article is a review of L. A. Popkova's monograph “Legal Construction of Syndicated Credit”. L. A. Popkova's monograph written on the topic, the relevance of which is explained the absence of serious research in the field of legal regulation of syndicated lending in legal science. The deep legal analysis of the problems of syndicated credit regulation contained in the work is explained by the connection of the research topic with the practical activities of the author. In the presented work for the first time, a comprehensive legal study of syndicated lending was carried outthe concept of legal regulation of syndicated credit taking into account international experience.

A Survey of the Microstructure of Fixed-Income Markets

In this article, we survey the literature that studies fixed-income trading rules and outcomes, including Treasury securities, corporate and municipal bonds, and structured credit products. We compare and contrast the microstructure and regulation of fixed-income markets with equity markets. We highlight the nature of over-the-counter trading in the face of search costs and the associated slow evolution of electronically facilitated intermediation. We discuss the databases available to study fixed-income microstructure, as well as measures and determinants of trading costs, and the important roles dealer networks and limited transparency play. We also highlight unresolved issues.

RISE AND FALL OF SYNTHETIC CDO MARKET: LESSONS LEARNED

This paper uses a unique data set of more than 1000 synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) deals to describe typical structures, their pricing and performance with the aim of identifying the factors behind the spectacular collapse of this important segment of structured credit market in late 2008. The data suggests that mark-to-market losses on many synthetic CDO tranches were much more significant than in case of simpler, lower-rated products despite the former experiencing little or no impairment of the notional. The losses were driven instead by the concentration of relatively limited number of defaults in a short period of time, suggesting that pre-crisis pricing must have seriously underestimated such risk of default clustering. In view of the post-crisis pick-up in synthetic CDO issuance, the paper attempts to heed this lesson and offer a simple factor model of default correlation in the spirit of Marshall–Olkin that is naturally suited to capturing the temporal dimension of default dependencies that have been crucial for synthetic CDOs investors. The model allows building a rich dependence structure capable of consistently fitting standardized iTraxx and CDX index tranches, which makes it ideal for pricing bespoke CDOs.