The extension of the franchise to social groups with less property and income is associated with greater income redistribution from the rich to the poor and extension in the provision of public goods, which leads to the growth of government expenditure. All of these expected changes are costly...

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...

In this paper, we provide the first overview over all political connections for all firms listed on the Berlin stock exchange in 1924 and for the same sample of firms four years later. In contrast to anecdotal evidence which suggest that these political connections had a positive effect on...

In this article, we evaluate underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) at the Berlin Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1896. In contrast to modern data, first day returns were extraordinary low and averaged less than five percent, even during the speculative period of the early 1870s....

We estimate effective spreads and round-trip transaction costs at the Berlin Stock Exchange for the period 1892-1913 using daily stock market returns for a sample of 27 stocks. Our results show that transaction costs at the main stock exchange in a bank-based financial system at the turn of the...

We analyze the determinants of illiquidity and its impact on asset pricing for purely call-auction traded stocks on Berlin Stock Exchange using 22 years of daily data (1892-1913). We use the Lesmond et al. (1999) measure of transaction costs to proxy illiquidity. We show that transaction costs...