EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How Rome enabled impersonal markets

Benito Arruñada

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Impersonal exchange increases trade and specialization opportunities, encouraging economic growth. However it requires the support of sophisticated public institutions. This paper explains how Classical Rome provided such support in the main areas of economic activity by relying on public possession as a titling device, enacting rules to protect innocent acquirers in agency contexts, enabling the extended family to act as a contractual entity, and diluting the enforcement of personal obligations which might collide with impersonal exchange. Focusing on the institutions of impersonal exchange, it reaches a clear positive conclusion on the market-facilitating role of the Roman state because such institutions have unambiguously positive effects on markets. Moreover, being impersonal, these beneficial effects are also widely distributed across society instead of accruing disproportionately to better-connected individuals.

Keywords: property rights; enforcement; transaction costs; Roman law; impersonal exchange; personal exchange; New Institutional Economics; Law and Economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 D23 G38 K11 K12 K14 K22 K36 L22 N13 O17 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1509.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Rome enabled impersonal markets (2016) Downloads
Working Paper: How Rome Enabled Impersonal Markets (2016) Downloads
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:upf:upfgen:1509

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1509