caa a22 4500 386331294 CHVBK 20180307111715.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0022050700008007 doi S0022050700008007 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0022050700008007 Olney Martha L. Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. Credit as a Production-Smoothing Device: The Case of Automobiles, 1913-1938 [Elektronische Daten] [Martha L. Olney] Credit financing of automobile sales and dealer inventories was provided primarily by hundreds of sales finance companies in the interwar United States. The few finance companies tied to auto manufacturers wrote 90 percent of credit business. Manufacturers initially established finance companies not to bolster retail sales but to finance dealers' wholesale inventory so manufacturers could lower average costs by smoothing seasonal production patterns. Moreover, until the Justice Department intervened, manufacturers apparently illegally coerced franchised dealers into using the manufacturer's preferred finance company rather than an independent. Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989 The Journal of Economic History Cambridge University Press 49/2(1989-06), 377-391 0022-0507 49:2<377 1989 49 JEH https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700008007 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700008007 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Olney Martha L. Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- The Journal of Economic History Cambridge University Press 49/2(1989-06), 377-391 0022-0507 49:2<377 1989 49 JEH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge