Retrospectives: From Usury To Interest

Evading the ‘Taint of Usury’: The usury prohibition as a barrier to entry

Article history: Received 9 April 2009 Available online xxxx The development of capital markets in medieval Europe was shaped for centuries by the religious ban on lending money at interest. This paper examines how this prohibition developed as the outcome of strategic behavior by religious, commercial and political elites. A model is developed to analyze this hypothesis and to examine how the ...

Nonparametrics: Retrospectives and Perspectives

Retrospectives on Intern

perspectives on international collaboration in high energy physics: • Gordon Fraser highlights the origins of panEuropean cooperation at CERN and DESY. • Hirotaka Sugawara frankly appraises the Japanese experience and plans for future colliders. • Alexander Skrinsky reviews the increasing reliance on international exchanges in the Russian program. • Zhou Guangzhao explains how international col...

Usury in the Purchase of Negotiable Paper

Interest Rate Restrictions in a Natural Experiment: Loan Allocation and the Change in the Usury Laws in 1714

This paper studies the effects of interest rate restrictions on loan allocation. In 1714, the British government tightened the usury laws, reducing the maximum permissible interest rate from 6 to 5 percent. A sample of individual loan transactions from a goldsmith bank allows us to examine how interest rate restrictions affected loan allocation. Average loan size and minimum loan size increased...