This paper presents new monthly capital gains, dividend yield, and total return indices for common equities quoted on British stock exchanges from 1829 to 1929. As well as creating an all-share index, we create a blue-chip index of the 30 largest companies, which we splice to the Financial Times...

In the decade before the famine, Ireland experienced a boom in Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). This paper analyses the motivations of MFI proponents and practitioners, and finds evidence linking the boom in MFIs with the introduction of the poor law in 1838. Many contemporary writers saw...

In this paper we will analyze the failure of the National Bank of Moldavia, a bank that was chartered by the Principality of Moldavia in 1856, to act primarily as a privileged source of liquidity for its economy. Although the project of a state chartered, privileged bank was planned many years...

Using a novel dataset where all traders are identifiable, we examine trading in the shares of a major company on the London Stock Exchange before 1920. Our main finding is that bid-ask spreads increased in the presence of informed trades. However, we also find that spreads narrowed during...

This article provides the first in-depth account on the organisational history of the Berlin Bourse based on archival evidence. It demonstrates that the microstructures of the Berlin Bourse basically corresponded to the needs and activities of the largest commercial banks and, consequently,...

Using a new biography of banks, we examine the stability of Irish banking from 1797 to 1826 by constructing a failure rate series. We find that the ultimate cause of the frequent and severe banking crises was the crisis-prone structure of the banking system, which was designed to benefit the...

This study examines the formalization of banking supervision in Japan and Sweden that occurred in the decades around 1900. Using an incremental change approach, the respective cases are traced and examined from three dimensions: 1) the legal framework, 2) the banking supervisory agency, and 3)...

The establishment of a central bank occurred at very different moments in the process of economic integration in the United States and the European Union. In this paper, we go into the first years of the Federal Reserve System through the lens of Paul van Zeeland's PhD dissertation. Paul van...

The early twentieth century saw an increasingly vocal movement which campaigned for women to be able to exercise their political voices independently of men. This coincided with more women participating directly in the stock market. In this paper we analyse whether these female shareholders...

The first attempt in the human history to consciously create money ended in a collapse in 1720, well-known as the money mania. This unfortunate start raises doubt on money creation as a whole such that today there are still voices questioning created money even though it is now indispensible for...