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Abstract

This paper advances the first historically informed typology of housing finance systems. Using a novel collection of historical mortgage-market data, we identify four different ‘ideal type’ systems, which developed in mature economies when organised housing finance institutions began to emerge with the advance of industrialism and urbanism throughout the long nineteenth century: informal person-to-person lending, and state lending as solutions outside specialised banking circuits; and deposit-based and bond-based institutions as banking solutions. We adapt Alexander Gerschenkron's economic backwardness thesis in order to explain the temporal and spatial emergence of these distinct types, arguing that these systems created path-dependent logics, which made their influence felt over a century later.