IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v61y2001i02p500-504_25.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Enforceability And Risk-Sharing In Financial Contracts: From The Sea Loan To The Commenda In Late Medieval Venice

Author

Listed:
  • De Lara, Yadira Gonzalez

Abstract

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that enhanced mobilization of capital and risk-sharing in late-medieval Venice.This disssertation was written at the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The funding of long-distance risky trade in late medieval Venice could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Institutions for contract enforcement were thus required to mitigate this commitment problem and enable welfare-enhancing financial exchange.Institutions are constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif, Historical Institutional Analysis; and North, Institutions. Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an optimal allocation of risk?

Suggested Citation

  • De Lara, Yadira Gonzalez, 2001. "Enforceability And Risk-Sharing In Financial Contracts: From The Sea Loan To The Commenda In Late Medieval Venice," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 61(2), pages 500-504, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:61:y:2001:i:02:p:500-504_25
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050701258100/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel J. Smith & George R. Crowley & J. Sebastian Leguizamon, 2021. "Long live the doge? Death as a term limit on Venetian chief executives," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 188(3), pages 333-359, September.
    2. Mark Koyama, 2008. "Evading the 'Taint of Usury' Complex Contracts and Segmented Capital Markets," Economics Series Working Papers 412, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    3. Koyama, Mark, 2010. "Evading the 'Taint of Usury': The usury prohibition as a barrier to entry," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 47(4), pages 420-442, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:61:y:2001:i:02:p:500-504_25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.