Challenging the Institutional Revolution of Credit Markets in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 269-290
Author(s):  
Gabriele B. Clemens ◽  
Daniel Reupke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Credit Markets

The Marriage Penalty: Women, Property Rights, and Credit Markets in Yucatán, 1850 – 1900

2008 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-454
Author(s):  
Juliette Levy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Credit Markets ◽  
Credit Market ◽  
Mortgage Market ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Economic Markets ◽  
Marital Property ◽  
Civil Codes ◽  
Property Regimes

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.

Notaries and Credit Markets in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Levy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Credit Markets ◽  
Credit Market ◽  
Financial Intermediaries ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Access To Credit ◽  
Banking Markets ◽  
Intermediary Role ◽  
Unique Dataset

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.

The Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Philip T. Hoffman ◽  
Gilles Postel-Vinay ◽  
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Credit Markets ◽  
Peer To Peer ◽  
Matching Markets ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Revolution

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.

Three Failures

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-68
Author(s):  
Sarah L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Credit Markets ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Farm Credit ◽  
Flow Through ◽  
Economic Landscape

This chapter examines three failed credit experiments on pooling loans, which articulated competing visions for a rapidly changing political economy. Each of these episodes was an attempt to move credit into the periphery in a way that was quicker, cheaper, easier, more stable, and more reliable than it had been before. To some extent, each involved corporate methods of organizing property and risk. Despite those similarities, however, there were also differences among the three experiments that reveal fundamental divides in how Americans made sense of a rapidly changing economic landscape. As Americans experimented with systems of credit distribution at the close of the nineteenth century, they fought over how competing interests should be reflected in a rapidly transforming political economy. Their clashing assumptions and values were built into these lending structures. Consequently, Americans' opinions of how credit should operate were forged through these lending structures as much as they were reflected in them. Each of these experiences resulted in hard-won insights about the challenges that plague credit markets. As such, these failures set the stage for a federal overhaul of farm credit in the early twentieth century. At stake in these efforts was not just the speed at which money might flow through credit markets, but also the principles that should guide those flows.

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