Private Lending in an Alpine Region during the Eighteenth Century: A Family of Merchant-Bankers and Their Credit Network
研究18世纪阿尔卑斯地区一个商人银行家族的借贷活动，发现其信贷决策兼具经济理性与社会动机，信贷网络揭示了当地社会结构，非正式借贷占主导，但公证人在向低地位借款人放贷中起关键作用。
The literature on early modern credit markets emphasizes both the social embeddedness of credit relationships and the role of notaries. To enhance our understanding of how credit markets functioned in a “less-developed” economy, we investigate the local lending activities of a merchant-banker family that operated at the intersection of formal and informal credit. A combination of economic rationality and social motivations in lending decisions emerges. The credit network of this family firm provides a portrait of the social structure of the local community, where the central position of a few trusted notaries and members of the business and political elite highlights the prevalence of relationships of power and favor over impersonal market exchange. The predominance of informal credit reveals a preference for loans made outside of notarial circuits. Nonetheless, notaries were crucial in lending to borrowers of lower social status and with weak ties, thus helping the liquidity of these merchants to “trickle down” into local society.