IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cmh/wpaper/11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pledging and Credit Markets in Medieval England

Author

Abstract

How can credit markets function in weakly institutionalized economies? We study rural credit markets in medieval England. Combining archival evidence from manorial court records with a model we examine the role played by personal sureties or pledges in enforcing contracts and overcoming asymmetric information. Pledging (1) widened the circle of individuals to whom a lender could extend credit thus augmenting the limited institutional capacity of courts, and (2) generated information on the quality of borrowers thereby alleviating the problem of adverse selection. We find that informal private-order arrangements could complement, as well as substitute for, formal, public, institutions.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Briggs, 2012. "Pledging and Credit Markets in Medieval England," Working Papers 5, Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cmh:wpaper:11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/CWPESHnumber5March2012.pdf
    File Function: None.
    Download Restriction: None.
    ---><---

    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:cmh:wpaper:11. 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: Amy Price (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dhcamuk.html .

    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.