Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collect over 500,000 monthly returns of British and foreign securities trading in London and the United States between 1866 and 1907. These heretofore-unknown data allow us to better quantify the historical benefits of international...

Central bank lender of last resort (LOLR) regimes are the last line of defence before governments are forced to resort to taxpayer-funded bailouts of the financial system. Yet despite this important role, along with a rich theoretical literature examining the function and design of LOLR regimes,...

This Essay challenges a central narrative in the history of Anglo-American business by questioning the importance of the corporate form. The corporate form was not, as we have long believed, the exclusive historical source of powers such as limited liability, entity shielding, tradable shares,...

Using historical data that spans almost 150 years, we examine whether there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the stock's earnings and bond yields. The novelty of our econometric methodology consists in using a vector error correction model where we allow multiple structural breaks...

This paper examines the uncovered interest parity hypothesis using the dollar-sterling exchange rate during the gold standard era. This period is interesting because the exchange rate was seasonal, because transactions costs were high, and because occasions when uncovered interest rate...

Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collect over 500,000 monthly returns of British and foreign securities trading in London and the United States between 1866 and 1907. These heretofore-unknown data allow us to better quantify the historical benefits of international...

In this essay, I make the case for the historical study of bank supervision—both that historical methods are necessary to understanding the shape and structure of supervision in the present and that the study of supervision will contribute to active and important historiographical debates....

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

We combine annual stock market data for the most important equity markets of the last four centuries: the Netherlands/U.K. (1629-1812), U.K. (1813-1870) and U.S. (1871-2015). We show that dividend yields are stationary and consistently forecast returns. The documented predictability holds for...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...