Stock market prediction has always caught the attention of many analysts and researchers. Popular theories suggest that stock markets are essentially a random walk and it is a fool’s game to try and predict them. Predicting stock prices is a challenging problem in itself because of the number...

We study the ownership structure of joint-stock firms for the period of 1869 to 1945 based on a unique hand-collected data set. The data covers a selection of 785 general meetings of 276 firms, including details of more than 10,000 investors. We show that after the hyperinflation of 1923, when...