This study explores individual and country-level environmental drivers of informal “seed” investment. We examine four types of informal investors based on business ownership experience (or no such experience) and close family relationship with investee (or no such relationship): “classic love...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did itmake a contribution to industrial development in interwar Britain? The interwar stock marketlaboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffectiveunderwriting. New...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China’s paramount banking center. Itsremoteness and China’s almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historiansto posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

This paper suggests that changing risk conveys information useful to improve performance.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

This study offers the unique opportunity to analyze how an unprecedented crisis such as the September 11 tragedy in uences expected returns and volatility forecasts of individual investors. Via e-mail, we asked a randomly selected group of individual investors with accounts at a German online...