Your Job Is Your Credit: Creating a Market for Loans to Salaried Employees in New York City, 1885–1920
研究了20世纪初纽约市面向工薪阶层的个人贷款市场，揭示了“贷款鲨鱼”如何通过高利率短期贷款形成大规模地下金融网络，对理解早期消费信贷市场有参考价值。
In the first decade of the twentieth century, a market in the personal debt of corporate and government employees was thriving in New York City and other major urban centers in the Northeastern andMidwestern United States. A set of shadowy entrepreneurs, colloquially known as “loan sharks,” offered short-term, high-rate advances that they called salary loans. Despite operating in violation of the law, primarily the prohibition against usury, the operations of these intermediaries had by 1912 reached an imposing scale. At least eighty-one such offices operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with millions of dollars in loans outstanding. Of these eighty-one offices, thirty-four belonged to interstate chains, the largest ofwhich stretched over sixtythree cities in the United States and Canada.