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

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.

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“Sharp Practice”

California History ◽

10.1525/ch.2015.92.4.24 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 92 (4) ◽

pp. 24-47

Author(s):

Clay Stalls

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Los Angeles ◽

Property Rights ◽

Gilded Age ◽

Marital Property ◽

Land Speculation ◽

Property Holding

The Centinela Land Company of Daniel Freeman and Francis Pliny Fisk Temple and other prominent Los Angeles businessmen demonstrates the practices and philosophy of land speculation that fueled the city's growth during the Gilded Age. Furthermore, the company's history also demonstrates the close ties between these businessmen and their shared, frequently byzantine, business ethos. The Centinela venture also yields unexpected insights into marital property holding and women's property rights in nineteenth-century Los Angeles.

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Ehe, Familie und Verwandtschaft. Beziehungen in sozialen, ökonomischen und rechtlichen Kontexten

Niederösterreich im 19. Jahrhundert, Band 2: Gesellschaft und Gemeinschaft. Eine Regionalgeschichte der Moderne ◽

10.52035/noil.2021.19jh02.09 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 219-250

Author(s):

Gertrude Langer-Ostrawsky ◽

Margareth Lanzinger

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Legal Framework ◽

Power Structures ◽

Unwed Mothers ◽

Men And Women ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Marital Property ◽

Legal Contexts ◽

Property Regimes

rriage, Family, and Kinship. Social, Economic, and Legal Contexts. This article focuses on the fundamental aspects of marriage, family, and kin relationships in nineteenth-century Lower Austria with an emphasis on rural areas. The range of topics includes household formations and forms of matchmaking, conditions for starting a family, marriage restrictions and marriage prohibitions, the presence of kin, relationships between the genders and generations in interaction with marital property regimes and inheritance practices, remarriage, unwed mothers, and the ever-present potential for conflict. One of the aims is to ascertain how marriage, family, and kin were interconnected with the governmental-administrative power structures, and to what extent the existing legal framework helped shape the options available to men and women. Continuity and change often overlapped – we see this in the manorial system lasting until 1848 or the continued institution of joint marital property, which strengthened the position of wives and widows beyond the standard dictated by the provisions of the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811.

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Notaries and Credit Markets in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

The Business History Review ◽

10.1017/s0007680500002208 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 84 (3) ◽

pp. 459-478 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

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.

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Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Law and History Review ◽

10.1017/s0738248020000358 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 39 (1) ◽

pp. 97-133

Author(s):

Casey Marina Lurtz

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Economic Policy ◽

Fiscal Policy ◽

Credit Market ◽

Civil Code ◽

Everyday Practice ◽

Enforcement Mechanisms ◽

Civil Codes ◽

Municipal Court

Between the 1870s and the 1910s, municipal court officials in southernmost Mexico recorded contracts regarding small debts and credits in what they labeled libros de conocimientos. While only very rarely citing Mexico's new civil codes of the 1870s and 1880s, the contracts contained in these registers regularly engaged with the kinds of agreements, guarantees, and enforcement mechanisms laid out in the code. They also capture an active, if still elusive, quotidian credit market for the far from well-to-do. This article uses these registers to trace the creation and evolution of Mexico's civil code from the periphery of the country rather than its center. By looking at the ways farmers, smalltime merchants, housewives, and laborers made use of its forms and norms, we can see how liberal economic policy permeated society through use. The determination of everyday people to make good on the protections and possibilities of liberalized fiscal policy cemented that policy in everyday practice.

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Property in Land in Roman Provinces

10.1093/oso/9780198813415.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Georgy Kantor

Keyword(s):

Local Property ◽

Legal Tradition ◽

Technical Literature ◽

Historical Scholarship ◽

Property Relations ◽

Roman Provinces ◽

Legal Regimes ◽

The Right ◽

Property Regimes

Roman concept of dominium has been fundamental in the formation of concepts of ownership in European legal tradition. It is, however, often considered outside the context of Roman imperial rule and of the multiplicity of legal regimes governing property relations in Roman provinces outside Italy. This chapter starts from the classic passage in the Institutes of Gaius, claiming that the right of dominium did not exist in provincial land, where it belonged to the Roman state. Gaius’ statement is often dismissed in modern historical scholarship as a ‘conveyancer’s fantasy’ (A.H.M. Jones). It is argued here that, on the contrary, this passage and other similar statements in Roman juristic literature and technical literature on land-measurement, show an important facet of Roman ideas of ownership as a socially contingent right, dependent on civic status of the owner, status of the territory within the empire, and Roman recognition of local property regimes.

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The strategic response of banks to macroprudential policies: Evidence from mortgage stress tests in Canada

Review of Finance ◽

10.1093/rof/rfab009 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Robert Clark ◽

Shaoteng Li

Keyword(s):

Interest Rate ◽

Credit Markets ◽

Mortgage Market ◽

Financial Intermediaries ◽

Stress Tests ◽

Difference In Differences ◽

Strategic Response ◽

Macroprudential Policies ◽

The Interest Rate

Abstract Following the crisis, macroprudential regulations targeting mortgage-market vulnerabilities were widely adopted, their success often relying on the response of financial intermediaries. We provide evidence from Canada suggesting banks may have behaved strategically to limit the effectiveness of recently implemented mortgage stress tests. Before implementation, borrowers had to prove they could make mortgage payments based on the interest rate specified in the contract. The new tests require borrowers to show they can afford payments based on a typically higher qualifying rate, derived from the mode of 5-year rates posted by the six largest banks. The government’s objective was to cool credit markets, but, since many mortgages are government-insured, the big banks’ interests were not aligned. We find evidence of rate manipulation using a difference-in-differences approach comparing changes in spreads for 5-year mortgages with 3-year spreads, unaffected by the policy. The qualifying rates were lowered encouraging continued borrowing, muting the tests’ impact.

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Staking out an inshore commons: Pound-netting in Gilded Age America

International Journal of Maritime History ◽

10.1177/0843871420974064 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 3-15

Author(s):

David Ress

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Property Rights ◽

Fish Species ◽

Gilded Age ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Important Food ◽

The Commons ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Over Exploitation ◽

Specific Part

Controversy over the expansion of pound netting in the largest US fisheries of the late nineteenth century marked an early conflict between those who considered fisheries a commons and those who sought to establish property rights in a fishery. Pound-netters physically staked out a specific part of the sea for their exclusive use, and their conception of their property rights resulted in significant overfishing of important food – and oil – fish species. Here, just as with the commons that many economists argue inevitably result in over-exploitation of a resource, regulation was rebuffed and the fisheries collapsed.

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