Governments often attempt to increase the confidence of financial market participants by making implicit or explicit guarantees of uncertain credibility. Confidence in these guarantees presumably alters the size of the financial sector, but observing the long-run consequences of failed...

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...

A commonly cited benefit of the classical gold standard is that it reduced borrowing costs by signaling a country's commitment to financial probity. Using a new dataset, this paper tests whether gold-standard adherence was negatively correlated with the cost of capital. Conditional on UK risk...

Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collected 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...

The authors find that between 1870 and 1913, large open market purchases of Treasury securities made by the U.S. Treasury Department narrowed the yield spread between Treasury bonds with high interest rate risk (the risk of an investment’s value changing on account of interest rate changes)...

Governments often attempt to increase the confidence of financial market participants by making implicit or explicit guarantees of uncertain credibility. Confidence in these guarantees presumably alters the size of the financial sector, but observing the long-run consequences of failed...

It has been suggested that financial instability may be more likely following periods of low bond market risk premiums. The timing of past episodes of instability casts doubt upon the hypothesis that low levels of risk premiums sow the seeds of future instability.