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 British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classesas the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order wherebythe landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

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...

Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them "unique" is the combination of accepting...

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 analyses derives market-wide price and return series for housing investment during a 13-year period, and it also provides estimates of the individual-specific, idiosyncratic, variation in housing returns.

This paper shows that the stock price of the rating agency Moody’s reacts negatively to ratingactions that are perceived to indicate low rating quality. The reaction is economicallysignificant. The cumulative effect corresponds to a 20% loss in market capitalization. Thissuggests that market...

Rating agencies state that they take a rating action only when it is unlikely to bereversed shortly afterwards. Using a formal representation of the rating process, I showthat such a policy provides a good explanation for the empirical evidence: ratingchanges relatively seldom occur, they...