In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime’s sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational,...

During World War II, the spread between the 3 percent rentes and the Vichy government bonds reflected French investors' perception of the shifting fortunes of war and the willingness of future post-war government to repay the debt issued by the collaborationist regime. Structural breaks in this...

The literature has not reached a consensus yet regarding the existence of sovereign creditor moral hazard. Exploiting an exceptional historical example, this paper proposes an original method to address this issue. As the corona which is observable only during a total eclipse of the sun,...

Art is often used as an investment vehicle. Given the importance of market efficiency in finance, we use a large auction-based index to test whether the art market is weakly efficient. Evidence reveals that returns on artworks exhibit high positive auto-correlation. We attribute this result to...

History provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults. This article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective. It then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with...

In the Belle Époque, Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom, but growth in output per capita was lackluster. We seek to reconcile this ostensible paradox. Because of the sharp decline in both fixed and variable trade costs, the trade boom was as much about the expansion in the number of...