We use event-time methodology to study legal insider trading associated with mergers circa 1900. For mergers with "prospective" disclosures similar to today's, we find substantial value gains at announcement, implying participation by "outside" shareholders despite the absence of insider...

We study interbank lending and asset sales markets in which banks with surplus liquidity have market power vis-à-vis banks needing liquidity, frictions arise in lending due to moral hazard, and assets are bank-specific. Surplus banks ration lending and instead purchase assets from needy banks,...

Moen and Tallman (J Econ Hist 60:145–163, 2000) show that clearinghouse membership reduced deposit contraction of commercial banks and trusts during the panic of 1907. This paper uses analogous data on New York banks during the panic of 1893 to quantify the value of clearinghouse membership....

Historical wealth micro-data from Wentworth County, Ontario examines the evolution of female and male wealth holding in the wake of 19th century property rights legislation. The results reveal that male wealth was greater than female wealth in Wentworth County but that over time the gap...

El best-seller de Ken Follett, Una fortuna peligrosa, además de los ingredientes habituales del género, contiene abundante información económica, al relatar la historia de un banco ficticio, pero cuyas operaciones y problemas son idénticos a los de los bancos reales, en una sucesión de...

In the wake of a series of crises, international and domestic financial regulation has become highly complex and prescriptive, and oriented to leverage, liquidity, and capital ratios among financial institutions. This raises concerns over monitoring incentives, and over the increased role of...

The fully amortized mortgage loan contract is an important instance of financial innovation in the U.S. residential mortgage market. We examine the adoption of this contract from the 1880s to the 1930s by building and loan (B&L) associations, the nation's most important institutional home...

This article presents an overview of the history of corporate governance in the United States, emphasizing the period before the advent of federal securities laws and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Recent research has overturned many widely accepted beliefs about corporate...

Efforts in the United States to promote bank liquidity through reserve requirements, a minimum ratio of liquid assets relative to liabilities, extend as far back as 1837. Despite such requirements, banking panics and suspensions of deposit convertibility continued to occur. Eventually,...

Under the Articles of the Confederation, the central government of the United States had limited power to tax. Therefore, large debts accumulated during the US War for Independence traded at deep discounts. That situation framed a US fiscal crisis in the 1780s. A political revolution ?for that...