This essay looks at the bidirectional relationship between financial history and financial economics. It begins by giving a brief history of financial economics by outlining the main topics of interest to financial economists. It then documents and explains the increasing influence of financial...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that, at all times, the price of a security reflects all available information about its fundamental value. The implication of the EMH for investors is that, to the extent that speculative trading is costly, speculation must be a loser's game. Hence,...

This paper contributes to the debate on the link between speculation and price volatility in two ways. First, a simple CAPM model is used to derive the demand for commodity futures contracts by institutional investors, and this derived demand is then integrated into a simple rational...