Usury ceilings and bank lending behavior: Evidence from nineteenth century New York

Few pieces of economic regulation are ubiquitous as usury limits. Similarly, few economic principles are as widely accepted as the belief that interference with freely contracted prices leads to market distortions, and many studies of financial markets find that usury limits negatively affect credit availability. This study shows that when no regulatory authority monitors and stands ready to punish violators of the usury limit when intermediaries and borrowers form long-term relationships, banks and borrowers regularly contract for interest rates in excess of the usury ceiling. Time-series analysis reveals limited effects on credit availability when market rates exceed the usury ceiling. Cross-sectional analysis of individual loan contracts also shows that the positive effect of a long-term relationship offsets the negative effect of the usury limit on credit availability.     

Household and market production of families in a late nineteenth century American city

Urban families in the late nineteenth century depended upon their children as their most important source of labor income apart from the male head of house-hold. This paper explores the determinants of the labor force participation of children over 10 years old within the context of the economic theory of household and market production, using microlevel data from 1880 Philadelphia. The father's income and unemployment, the presence of the mother or father, boarders, servants, older and younger siblings, parents' literacy, and ethnicity, among other variables, are used in a probit analysis of the labor force participation of children. The results validate the economic theory of household and market production demonstrating, in particular, substitution between mothers and their daughters and the role of comparative advantage in family decisions concerning the allocation of their members' time. Ethnic differences were only important for daughters.     

The Paris financial market in the nineteenth century: complementarities and competition in microstructures1

This article sets out to explain why the Paris Bourse was highly successful in the nineteenth century in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly of the official market, the Parquet. The literature argues that the official monopoly was sidelined by a free, innovative market known as the Coulisse, but it fails to explain how the Coulisse emerged despite the monopoly and how the two markets persisted alongside each other during the entire century. We provide a detailed history of how these two markets emerged and interacted. The Parquet increasingly developed as a high‐end market, providing security, transparency, and effective settlement‐delivery to unsophisticated investors trading on the spot market. The Coulisse provided liquidity, immediacy, and opacity to professional investors trading mostly forward. In line with recent theoretical developments, we argue that the juxtaposition of heterogeneous organizations had important virtues for market participants, since it allowed the exchanges to specialize in different investors and services and made the exchanges complementary to each other. We demonstrate our claim by looking at both the formal rules and the actual functioning of the Parquet, drawing on its archives which we have recently classified.     

Swedish artisans in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The history of the artisan class and of the gild system in Sweden has been dealt with in a number of works, such as Professor E. Heckscher's Sveriges ekonomiska historia [The Economic History of Sweden] and in two of the volumes of the great work of Landsorganisationen ¹ Landsorganisationen, popularly known as ‘L.O’, the Swedish equivalent of the T.U.C. : Den svenska arbetarklassens historia [History of the Swedish Working Class], as well as in Professor E. Söderlund's Stockholms hantverkarklass 1720–1772 [The Artisan Class of Stockholm, 1720–1772]. These topics are of course also touched upon in histories of towns and other literature. However, in those studies which cover the whole country the subject has only been pursued to the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th. The subsequent period is discussed in Henry Lindström's two books Näringsfrihetens utveckling i Sverige 1809–1836 and Näringsirihetsirågan i Sverige 1837–1864 [The Development of Industrial Freedom in Sweden, 1809–1836, and The Problem of Industrial Freedom in Sweden, 1837–1864], but only from a special point of view. Thanks, however, to the good offices of Sveriges hantuerks- och småindustriorgonisation (The Swedish Craft and Minor Industries Organisation), an attempt has now been made, in a work by Dr. Tom Söderberg that has been in preparation for some time, to fill the gap thus existing in respect of the period after 1815. The result, in spite of the relatively limited number of pages, is a very comprehensive exposition, even if the subject obviously cannot be exhausted within the given frame of reference.     

Indian railroading: floating railway companies in the late nineteenth century

This article provides a case study of four late nineteenth-century share flotations of Indian railway companies. It highlights an important gap in the historiography of Indian railway finance, which has focused on the period up to 1875. The role of N. M. Rothschild as lead underwriter and its relationship with the India Office, managing agents, and investors is analysed. This gives an evolving picture of mutual dependence between the City and Whitehall in the financing of the British Empire's largest investment programme. Gentlemanly capitalists are shown to combine the self-reinforcing roles of arranger, investor, and informal government advisor.     

Joint stock companies in Finland in the nineteenth century

Abstract

In most countries joint stock companies appeared before any attention was paid to this form of association in legislation. The lack of official sanction, however, had a restraining effect on the creation of joint stock companies, and their economic breakthrough did not, as a rule, occur until the company as an institution had been legally acknowledged.     

Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century

This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biography . It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late nineteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small proportion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobility are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any integration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.     

Growth and improverishment in the middle of the nineteenth century

This paper applies the techniques for the development of ‘soft’ data to gain insight into the historical impacts of economic change on the structure and extent of poverty in the early stages of commercialization and industrialization. A typology of the structure of poverty is constructed for 1850 for 24 countries and the nine types which emerge are ranked partially by the probable extent of extreme poverty. The nature and ranking of the types are then used to develop hypotheses regarding the historical processes generating poverty. The paper focuses on the poorest stratum of society in countries of widely different levels of development. The study suggests that the phenomena generating poverty in 1850 were surprisingly similar to those operating in today's developing countries.     

Chinese immigration and contract labor in the late nineteenth century

This paper considers why the Chinese migrants who came to California in the late 19th century were not indentured, and what their contractual status in the United States actually was. We argue that existing American laws prevented the effective use of a legal indenture system when Chinese laborers began to arrive in California in the 1850s, but that Chinese merchants in San Francisco developed extralegal means of operating a bound labor system. We explore the conduct of this system, with particular attention to the methods used by the merchants to enforce the repayment of the workers' debts for advances of passage fares.     

The historiography of French economic growth in the nineteenth century

There has been a long-standing debate about French nineteenth-century economic growth. After 1945 the ‘retardation—stagnation’ thesis dominated. From the 1960s ‘revisionists’ painted a more optimistic view. Recently, ‘anti-revisionism’ has revived gloomy ideas. New research has been primarily responsible for changes of view. National income estimates, and later cliometric studies, bolstered the revisionist argument. Work on the ‘great depression’ stimulated anti-revisionism. Scholars have also been influenced by the economic and political state of France at the time they were writing and the debate has been somewhat politicized. The article ends by surveying the ‘moderate revisionism’ which now prevails.     

Growth and welfare in the American South of the nineteenth century

Economic history focuses on two main issues: one is the economic growth, stagnation, or decline of a society; the other is what happens to people within the society in the course of such growth, stagnation, or decline.     

Crisis in finnish agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

The arrival of cheap American wheat in the European market the 1870's brought down the prices of agricultural produce, in particular those of grain. The resulting agricultural depression led in turn to the adoption in most countries of protectionist policies. In Scandinavia, however, only Sweden resorted to protection; Denmark, Norway and Finland adhering to free trade. Denmark was successful in her efforts to switch over to a many-sided dairy-farming; the agricultural policy of Norway was — according to O. A. Johnsen1 Norwegische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1939, pp. 499-503. — not successful since not only the import of cereals but even the import of butter increased.