This paper presents a new indicator on financial stress from 1889 to 2016 based on the reporting in five major US newspapers. This indicator provides detailed and high-frequency coverage of more than a century of financial history based on a previously untapped corpus of 35 million newspaper...

EU policy-makers have focused on the creation of a “Capital Market Union” to advance the economic vitality of the EU in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 and the Eurozone crisis of 2011-13. The hope is that EU-wide capital markets will help remedy the limitations in the...

We assess systematic risk in the U.S. banking system before and after the Panic of 1873 using a combination of linear programming and computational optimization to estimate the interbank network based upon total gross and net positions of national banks a week before the crisis. We impose...

In a recent article in the Economic History Review, Celia and Grubb liken colonial Maryland's dollar-denominated bills of credit to discount securities, circulating at less than their face value. This note argues that the bills in question circulated at par with specie and were treated as...

Common conceptions about the history of insider trading norms in the United States are inaccurate and incomplete. In his landmark 1966 book Insider Trading and the Stock Market, Dean Henry Manne depicted a world in which insider trading was both widespread and universally accepted. It was SEC...

We evaluate the performance of two popular systemic risk measures, CoVaR and SRISK, during eight financial panics in the era before FDIC insurance. Bank stock price and balance sheet data were not readily available for this time period. We rectify this shortcoming by constructing a novel dataset...

It is well established in the literature that an independent judiciary can act as a signal of credibility by a sovereign state and as a guarantor of creditor rights. However, to date there has been little systematic work analyzing how an independent judiciary reacts to fiscal stress and...

This is an unpublished comment on a Perkin's paper that surveyed banking in colonial America. It argues that historians have overlooked a number of abortive banking schemes in the colonies, implying that the absence of banks was not an "entrepreneurial failure." and that the extension of the...

The pari passu clause found in most cross-border lending instruments contains the borrower's promise to ensure that the obligation will always rank equally in right of payment with all of the borrower's other unsubordinated debts. The international financial markets have long understood the...

This paper examines the question as to whether, before 1914, French savers bought foreign assets to gain higher foreign returns or because of low correlation. Using tools of the Modern Portfolio Theory, the benefit from international diversification is decomposed into these two components, using...