Entry, information, and financial development: A century of competition between French banks and notaries

Hoffman, Philip T.; Postel-Vinay, Gilles; Rosenthal, Jean‐Laurent

doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2014.04.002

Cited by 28 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Based on this information notaries were able to assortatively match lenders and borrowers depending on the characteristics of the loans like e.g. their duration, see Hoffman et al (2015). Segmentation across notaries was pretty strong.…”

Section: The Financial System and The Smoothing Of Crises In 19th Cenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Crises and the Eligibility for the Lender of Last Resort: Evidence from 19th Century France

Bignon

Jobst

2017

SSRN Journal

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This paper shows that a central bank can more efficiently mitigate economic crises when it broadens eligibility for its discount facility to any safe asset or solvent agent. We use difference-indifferences panel regressions and emulate crises by studying how defaults of banks and non-agricultural firms were affected by the arrival of an agricultural disease. We exploit the specificities of the implementation of the discount window to deal with the endogeneity of the access to the central bank to the arrival of the crisis and local default rates. We find that broad eligibility reduced significantly the increase in the default rate when the shock hit the local economy. A counterfactual exercise shows that defaults would have been 10% to 15% higher if the Bank of France would have implemented the strictest eligibility rule. This effect is identified independently of changes in policy interest rates and the fiscal deficit.

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Section: The Financial System and The Smoothing Of Crises In 19th Cenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Crises and the Eligibility for the Lender of Last Resort: Evidence from 19th Century France

Bignon

Jobst

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…3 "Estimates suggest that in 1900 traditional intermediaries were doing between 32 and 65 per cent of mortgage lending in Britain, Germany, and the United States" (Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal 2015). 4 In Scandinavian countries, the early cooperative housing associations served a similar purpose prior to the First World War (Sørvoll 2013: 106), whereas Central European countries rather relied on municipal and nonprofit rental housing (Kuhn 2007).…”

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of national housing finance systems: a comparative investigation into historical variations in mortgage finance regimes

Blackwell

Kohl

2017

Review of International Political Economy

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This paper advances the first historically informed typology of housing finance systems. Using a novel collection of historical mortgage-market data, we identify four different ‘ideal type’ systems, which developed in mature economies when organised housing finance institutions began to emerge with the advance of industrialism and urbanism throughout the long nineteenth century: informal person-to-person lending, and state lending as solutions outside specialised banking circuits; and deposit-based and bond-based institutions as banking solutions. We adapt Alexander Gerschenkron's economic backwardness thesis in order to explain the temporal and spatial emergence of these distinct types, arguing that these systems created path-dependent logics, which made their influence felt over a century later

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“…Before the development of the banking system, notaries provided a large allocation of capital. Mortgages through notaries represented 40% of the GDP of France in 1840 (Hoffman et al, 2011). Again, we use an average of five years of tax (1817-1821), we then divided the figures by the population of each Department according to the census of 1822.…”

Section: Measures Of Economic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Customary versus Civil Law within Old Regime France

Le Bris

2014

SSRN Journal

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Abstract:Law and finance theory emphasizes the negative consequences of civil law on financial and, subsequently, economic development. Before the Revolution, French territory was strictly divided according to the legal regime. Since the Middle-Ages, the southern part of France was under Justinian civil law and the north was under customary laws which, as with common law, gave more flexibility to judges and less right to the state. This dichotomy offers the unique opportunity to test the law and finance theory free from cross-country bias. Using fiscal revenues across 79 Departments from 1817-1821, we test if Departments under civil law, over the centuries and up to 15 years ago, exhibit lower financial and economic outcomes. We find that civil law Departments do exhibit lower economic performances but this difference is not robust when controlled for fundamental factors.The civil law appears even to have a positive effect in many specifications. Old Regime France does not confirm the law and finance theory.

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Entry, information, and financial development: A century of competition between French banks and notaries

Cited by 28 publications

References 24 publications

Economic Crises and the Eligibility for the Lender of Last Resort: Evidence from 19th Century France

Economic Crises and the Eligibility for the Lender of Last Resort: Evidence from 19th Century France

The origins of national housing finance systems: a comparative investigation into historical variations in mortgage finance regimes

Customary versus Civil Law within Old Regime France

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