The success of the Bordeaux Mont-de-Piété, 1801–1913
This article analyses the success of the Bordeaux Mont-de-Piété between 1801 and 1913. This success was related to several factors. While the legislative environment was already advantageous (monopoly status for pawnbroking), the establishment prospered courtesy of the social and economic environment. There was indeed high social demand for financial aid linked to the individual needs of a population that found itself in a situation of virtual exclusion. The establishment also benefited from high repayment rates, which limited additional costs, regularly found ways to refinance its operations and took advantage of there being no people's banking system.
Montes de piedad and savings banks as microfinance institutions on the periphery of the financial system of mid-nineteenth-century Barcelona
This article departs from the dominant interpretation of montes de piedad as charitable pawnshops, typical of Catholic Europe, by framing the analysis of their activities as microfinance institutions. Fieldwork documents two cases in the industrial city of Barcelona during the mid-nineteenth century. The long established Monte de Piedad de Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza de Barcelona (MPB) offered small loans to the most disadvantaged sectors, with more than 70% of its clients being very low-income women. In contrast, the Montepío Barcelonés covered a broader spectrum, granting larger loans to clients, of whom the majority were working-class men. But during periods of extreme illiquidity, such as the financial and industrial crisis of 1847–48, the Montepío Barcelonés would even support traders and manufacturers. Hence, this article shows how not-for-profit financial institutions, located on the periphery of the new and burgeoning financial system, are able to contribute to mitigating the social costs of industrialisation, through alleviating situations of crisis and adding to the resilience of the financial system as a whole.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.