The Mississippi Bubble, South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Windhandel of 1720 together represent the world's first global financial bubble. We hand-collect cross-sectional price data and investor account data from 1720 to test theories about market bubbles. Our tests suggest that innovation was a...

The first global financial bubble in stock prices occurred 1720 in Paris, London and the Netherlands. Explanations for these linked bubbles primarily focus on the irrationality of investor speculation and the corresponding stock price behavior of two large firms: the South Sea Company in Great...

The correlation structure of the world equity markets varies considerably over the past 150 years. We show that correlations were high during periods of economic and financial integration. We decompose the benefits of international diversification into two parts: a component that measures...

We test a Wall Street investment strategy, pairs trading, with daily data over 1962-2002. Stocks are matched into pairs with minimum distance between normalized historical prices. A simple trading rule yields average annualized excess returns of up to 11 percent for selffinancing portfolios of...

Daily pricing of mutual funds provides liquidity to investors but is subject to valuation errors due to the inability to observe synchronous, fair security prices at the end of the trading day. This may hurt fund investors if speculators strategically seek to exploit mispricing or if the net...

In this paper we examine the correlation structure of the major world equity markets over 150 years. We find that correlations vary considerably through time and are highest during periods of economic and financial integration such as the late 19th and 20th centuries. Our analysis suggests that...

The correlations among international real estate markets are surprisingly high, given the degree to which they are segmented. While industrial, office and retail properties exist all around the world, they are not economic substitutes because of locational specificity. In addition, the broad...

Daily pricing of mutual funds provides liquidity to investors but is subject to valuation errors due to the inability to observe synchronous, fair security prices at the end of the trading day. This may hurt fund investors if speculators strategically seek to exploit mispricing or if the net...

Using a sample of daily net flows to nearly 1,000 U.S. mutual funds over a year and a half period, we identify a set of systematic factors that explain a significant amount of the variation in flows. This suggests the existence of a common component to mutual fund investor behavior and indicates...