Tag: financial-history
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How Credit Rating Systems Emerged
Credit rating systems exist to solve an information asymmetry problem. Their history, from the first commercial credit reporter to the structured finance failures of 2008, reveals how institutional solutions to market failures can become market failures themselves.
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The History of Bankruptcy Law
Trace bankruptcy law as an economic institution — from ancient debt slavery and debtors' prison through Italian commercial innovation to the US 1898 Bankruptcy Act — and what cross-country variation reveals about how legal institutions shape entrepreneurial risk-taking.
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The History of Marine Insurance
From Venetian bottomry loans to Lloyd's Coffee House, marine insurance solved the problem that prevented large-scale commercial voyages: how to distribute catastrophic risk across enough counterparties that no single loss could destroy a merchant's capital.
