Les bénéfices terrestres de la charité: les rentes viagères des Hôpitaux parisiens 1660-1690
Pierre-Charles Pradier
Post-Print from HAL
Abstract:
It is generally accepted that in the seventeenth century there was no proper evaluation of life annuities. The institutions that sold these financial assets would therefore have done so arbitrarily, and the bankruptcy of Parisian charitable institutions in 1689 is commonly attributed to this issue. By cross-checking sources, we show that the prices of annuities are compatible with Deparcieux's mortality table discounted at the legal rate of interest. This suggests that annuities were correctly evaluated. On the other hand, the management of reserves seems problematic, even if the lack of reliable assets and cyclical constraints facilitated the underfunding of annuities and led the Parisian hospitals into difficulty. Far from assuming a form of detached supervision, the monarchy contributed to Hôtel-Dieu's illiquidity by manipulating the bonds of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris. Most surprising is the fact that the government immediately issued bonds on even more unfavourable terms than those it had forbidden, without then ensuring it had the means to repay what it had agreed to the Hôtel-Dieu.
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00652523
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Published in Histoire & Mesure, 2011, XXVI (2), pp.29-74
Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00652523/document (application/pdf)
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:hal:journl:hal-00652523
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().