Financial Intermediation in Colonial Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Buenos Aires: Credit, Trust, and Asymmetric Information

Martín Wasserman
Additional contact information
Martín Wasserman: Universidad de Buenos Aires

A chapter in Beyond Banks, 2025, pp 75-100 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In colonial Spanish economies, notaries played a legal and a financial role. Long before banks existed in the region, commercial actors relied on notaries to access credit and to allocate it, because notaries had better access to information than the parties to the transaction. The notary and his office were an informational device, which counterbalanced the asymmetric information between contract parties, providing connections between potential lenders and potential borrowers without the need for pre-existing interpersonal links.

Keywords: Financial intermediation; Notaries; Information; Buenos Aires (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:psitcp:978-3-031-75819-5_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783031758195

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-75819-5_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().