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Law School. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Before the 1930s Building and Loan Associations (B&Ls) were the leading residential mortgage leaders in the U.S. When severely distressed during the housing crisis of the 1930s, B&Ls frequently took years to liquidate. These delays in resolution resulted from the unique B&L contract that encouraged borrowing members to prolong dissolution and gave them shared control over the timing of liquidation. We estimate a hazard model of dissolution using a new dataset of New Jersey B&Ls and find that the probability of liquidation rose 37% when the share of non-borrowing members rose above two-thirds. The severe restriction on liquidity suffered by non-borrowers was instrumental to the rapid transition from the traditional B&L to the modern Savings & Loan industry during the 1930s housing crisis.

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Substantial regional differentials in mortgage rates persisted throughout the postbellum period. I find that these differentials reflected not only variations in lending risk, but also the costs incurred in transferring funds between markets and unexplained regional premia. The results are consistent with the traditional interpretation that capital markets were at least partially segmented throughout the late nineteenth century. The effects on home and farm mortgage rates in the South and West were substantial and suggest that market segmentation could have had a substantial impact on the regional pattern of urbanization as well as agricultural development.

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The introduction of the direct reduction (fully-amortized) loan contract to the U.S. residential mortgage market is an important instance of financial innovation. We describe the adoption of this contract within the building and loan (B&L) industry beginning in the 1880s and culminating in the 1930s. A long chain of complementary innovations at B&Ls gradually reduced the costs of adoption, leading to moderate use by the 1920s. The poor performance of traditional contracts during the crisis of the 1930s then radically altered the adoption calculus. At this point a new system of federal savings and loan charters incorporated many of the innovations that had been adopted within the small segment of the B&L industry that had introduced direct reduction lending by the 1920s. The B&L transition in mortgage contracts occurred primarily in the conventional loan market because B&Ls, unlike other lenders, generally avoided the use of the new FHA insurance program.