Pledging and Credit Markets in Medieval England

Chris Briggs ()
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Chris Briggs: Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-christopher-briggs
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Mark Koyama

No 5, Working Papers from Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge

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.

Keywords: credit markets; intermediaries; pledging; courts; formal and informal institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2012-03-01
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