In August 1763, northern Europe experienced a financial crisis with numerous parallels to the 2008 Lehman Brothers episode. The 1763 crisis was sparked by the failure of a major provider of acceptance loans, a form of securitized credit resembling modern asset-backed commercial paper. The...

This essay discusses trends in new banking history scholarship. It does so by conducting bibliometric content analysis of the entire literature involving the history of banks, bankers and banking published in all major academic journals since the year 2000. It places this recent scholarship in...

Can tight and centralized financial regulations prevent financial crises? Governments usually respond to financial crises with tightening and centralizing financial regulations. In this paper, we explore the historical parallels between the governmental responses to the financial crises at the...

In August 1763, northern Europe experienced a financial crisis with numerous parallels to the 2008 Lehman Brothers episode. The 1763 crisis was sparked by the failure of a major provider of acceptance loans, a form of securitized credit resembling modern asset-backed commercial paper. The...

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...

Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent failures can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The...

We find evidence that the runs on banks and trust companies in the Panic of 1907 were linked to the Bank of England's contractionary monetary policy actions taken in 1906 and 1907 through the medium of copper prices. Results from our VAR models and copper stockpile data support our argument that...

We examine 24 global factor premiums across the main asset classes via replication and new-sample evidence spanning 217 years of data. Replication yields ambiguous evidence within a unified testing framework with methods that account for p-hacking. The new-sample evidence reveals that the large...

One strand of the economics literature addresses financial deepening as a precursor to economic growth. Another views it as a cause of financial crises. We examine historical data for 17 economies from 1870 to 1929 to distinguish episodes of growth induced by financial deepening from crises...

Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...