Using a new weekly blue-chip index, this paper investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting...

The London Stock Exchange was the largest capital market in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Britain also had numerous other stock markets based in provincial cities and towns. This paper provides the first in-depth quantitative assessment of these markets. We find that...

The early twentieth century saw an increasingly vocal movement which campaigned for women to be able to exercise their political voices independently of men. This coincided with more women participating directly in the stock market. In this paper we analyse whether these female shareholders...

This paper presents new monthly capital gains, dividend yield, and total return indices for common equities quoted on British stock exchanges from 1829 to 1929. As well as creating an all-share index, we create a blue-chip index of the 30 largest companies, which we splice to the Financial Times...

Who financed the great expansion of the Victorian equity market, and what attracted them to invest? Using data on 453 firm-years and over 172,000 shareholders, we find that the largest providers of capital were rentiers, men with no formal occupation who relied on investment income. We also see...