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Redistribution and Long-Term Private Debt in Paris, 1660–1726

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Philip T. Hoffman ,
Gilles Postel-Vinay  and
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Philip T. Hoffman
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History and of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125;
Gilles Postel-Vinay
Affiliation:
Directeur de recherche at Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, 94205 Ivry-sur-Seine CEDEX, France;
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Economics at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
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Abstract

Based on a large sample from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the long-term private credit market in Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and analyzes how it was affected by government-caused redistribution. It estimates the level of private indebtedness from 1662 to 1789, explains the problems the credit market faced, and determines who profited and who lost when government defaults, banking reforms, and currency manipulations struck private borrowers and lenders. It concludes by accounting for the expansion of the credit market in the last half of the eighteenth century.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 256 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1995

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