Little is known about the performance of the US stock market before 1802, and evidence for the years following 1802 through the 1830s remains scanty. This paper describes a new database on total returns in the US stock market for the first fifty years of its existence, constructed in large part...

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...

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...

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...

To study the effect of political and institutional changes on the economy, we look at share prices in the Santiago exchange during the tumultuous political events that characterized Chile in the early 1970s. We use a transparent empirical strategy, deploying previously unused daily data and...

The return dynamics of Argentina's main stock index, the SP Mer.Val., show a high level of volatility, signaling a higher degree of downside risk. To hedge against that specific risk, investors could buy put options. However, the Argentinean capital market slacks variety of hedging contracts....

The Spanish Second Republic was a unique experiment of democratization in interwar Spain, which was characterized by extreme levels of political uncertainty. In response to this uncertainty, we find that investors sold stocks in favor of government bonds. In fact, political uncertainty had a...

The trust-free nature of blockchain-based systems challenges the role of traditional platform providers and enables the creation of new, intermediary-free markets. Despite the growing number of such markets, the impact of the blockchain's configuration on market outcomes remains unclear. In this...