We use the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to study the effect of bankers on corporate boards in facilitating access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations; this was especially true for railroads, which...

In this paper, I use the materials of the debate on the reliability and the utility of “business barometers” of the Twenties in order to show that the theoretical reflexions of the time could be used by economic historians as a working hypothesis to analyze the influence exerted by...

A significant challenge to empirically testing theories of discrimination has been the difficulty of identifying taste-based discrimination and of distinguishing it clearly from statistical discrimination. This paper addresses this problem through a two-part empirical test of taste-based...

This essay aims to analyze the economic and social role of foreign (forestieri) merchants and artisans in Venice between the low middle age and the early modern time. In search of new perspectives of work, many strangers, also of different religions, came in Venice, where they organize...

The aim of this paper is to show the strategies of the Venetian Patricians (and those from the Mainland) face to the risk. The diversifications of investments (in all the economic sectors, as agriculture, manufacture, trade, public and private finance) and the flexibility in the domestic and...

Some bank reforms of the 1930s in the United States may have been overvalued. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 actually created new endogenous risks involving potential systemic effects. Deposit insurance failed to address the main cause of banking panics, and rather strengthened inefficient unit...

We determine the events that cause large shocks in volatility of the DJIA index over the period 1928–2013, using a new semi-parametric test based on conditional heteroscedasticity models. We find that these large shocks can be associated with particular events (financial crashes, elections,...

Dix économistes français démontrent que la puissance économique américaine, basée sur sa supériorité technologique, une recherche de qualité, une réactivité et un optimisme sans faille n'est pourtant pas à l'abri de ses paradoxes. Son endettement, son déficit, ses scandales...

Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? Are there long run consequences? During the farm land price boom and bust before the Great Depression, we find that credit availability directly inflated land prices. Credit also amplified the relationship between positive fundamentals...

We analyze the dynamic comovement of commodity futures returns within each category (energy, precious metals, industrial metals, and agriculture) from 1997 to 2013 under the eects of the nancialization of commodity markets. Our findings from the dynamic equicorrelation GARCH model of ? show...