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[MMC]
The Workshop on Money, Markets and Consumption


Welcome to the University of Chicago's Workshop on Money, Markets and Consumption. The workshop strives to be a venue for economic sociologists to present their work (both finished and in progress) and receive feedback. Our faculty sponsors are Karin Knorr Cetina and Ryon Lancaster.

The workshop meets on Wednesdays throughout the quarter. For Fall 2009, we are in Harper Library, Room 145 (directions below). The session is from 12:00 noon to 1:20pm, with coffee and light snacks.

Find this quarter's schedule here: Calendar

November 18th, 12pm: Bruce Carruthers, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University; Credit, Classification and Cognition: Credit Raters in 19th-century America

In the U.S. economy, investors and lenders often depend on third-party sources of information to help resolve information asymmetries about the creditworthiness of borrowers. Rating agencies now play a central role in U.S. capital markets. Both the rating agencies, and their 19th century predecessors the mercantile agencies, produce assessments of creditworthiness that conform to a specific format: ordinally-ranked categories. These category systems are cognitive devices used by investors and lenders to simplify and make sense of inherently ambiguous situations. This paper examines the early evolution of credit rating systems, from the 1850s until the 1880s, with a particular focus on their categorical features. It traces both divergence and convergence in rating conventions and shows that raters were not simply interested in being 'accurate' but were also particularly concerned to protect intellectual property and reduce legal liability.


Workshop Location: Harper Memorial 145

William Rainey Harper Memorial Library
1116 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Directions
Mailing List
To join the MMC mailing list, which provides information about upcoming events, sends out presentation papers, etc., subscribe with the university listhost: http://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/mmc

To find out more about this workshop, contact the student coordinators:

Erica Coslor (ecoslor (at) uchicago.edu)
Karen Ellis (ellisk (at) uchicago.edu)
and Craig Tutterow (craigtutterow (at) uchicago.edu).