Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks: The Experience of Nuits St. Georges in Burgundy, 1756-1776

Abstract

Using a complete enumeration of credit contracts for a rural area in Burgundy, this article examines how credit markets functioned and what role they served. Credit markets distributed funds to a large fraction of the population, and they were organized to mediate problems of asymmetric information. A central constrain on credit markets, however, was the threat of government intervention. Because of this threat, capital markets remained relatively isolated from one another.

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© 1994 Economic History Association. I am grateful for the support provided by a grant from the Borchard Foundation and by NSF grants SBR 9258498 and SES 9022192. I would like to thank Avner Greif and Francois Velde for their comments and the editors of this journal for their help.

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