We use the unique circumstances that led to the Panic of 1907 to analyze its consequences for non-financial corporations. The onset of the panic occurred following a series of scandalous revelations about the investments of prominent financiers, which triggered widespread runs on trust companies...

This paper exploits a natural experiment from the late 1800s in which many U.S. firms had inadvertently issued both taxable and tax-exempt bonds. Investors paid income tax on taxable bonds, but firms covered income tax on investors' behalf on tax-exempt bonds. Using a unique data-set of these...

Investors have seen countless charts of US stock market performance which start in 1926 and end near the present. But US trading long predates 1926, and the foreshortened perspective that results from a focus on post-1926 data can be misleading. To compound the problem, visual and arithmetic...

The manner in which hostile takeovers have historically been executed has just begun to receive serious academic attention. Similarly, while the literature on the accuracy and determinants of share prices is voluminous, there has been little systematic historical analysis of when and how modern...

This paper analyzes daily wheat price volatility over an observation period of more than 140 years, using daily high and low prices of futures contracts traded at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), starting in 1877. We find that volatility differences between the identified regimes is much more...

We study the cross-section of stock returns using a novel constructed database of U.S. stocks covering 61 years of additional and independent data. Our database contains data on stock prices, dividends and hand-collected market capitalizations for 1,488 major stocks between 1866-1926. Results...

This paper describes an effort to extend the record of US stock market returns past the 1871 terminus of the Cowles (1938) data familiar from Schiller (2015). I combined the archival data supplied by Goetzmann, Ibbotson and Peng (2001) with data supplied by Sylla, Wilson and Wright (2006), and...