Merchant Account Books, Credit Sales, and Financial Development

Jeremy T. Schwartz, David Flynn and Gokhan Karahan

Accounting and Finance Research, 2018, vol. 7, issue 3, 154

Abstract: Credit in colonial New England, including the credit practices used by merchants, invites study beyond that in the existing literature which largely limits investigation to an individual merchant. Textual analysis of 56 merchant account books from Connecticut and Massachusetts across a breadth of the eighteenth century and conversion to Lawful Money allows a common quantification of the financial extent of merchant transactions throughout the century. Through some descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests, we find that use of book credit is ubiquitous and in amounts that imply that merchants were de facto financial intermediaries essential for the development of the economy.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/afr/article/download/13771/8517 (application/pdf)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/afr/article/view/13771 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jfr:afr111:v:7:y:2018:i:3:p:154

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Accounting and Finance Research from Sciedu Press Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sciedu Press ().