The Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) was the Russell Sage Foundation’s primary device for fighting what it viewed as the scourge of high-rate lending to poor people in the first half of the twentieth century. The USLL created a new class of lenders who could make small loans at interest rates...

In the United States today, the system of financial regulation is complex and fragmented. Responsibility to regulate the financial services industry is split between about a dozen federal agencies, hundreds of state agencies, and numerous industry-sponsored self-governing associations....

The failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank (FSB), one of the only Black-serving banks in the early post-bellum South, was an economic catastrophe and one of the great episodes of racial exploitation in post-Emancipation history. It was also most Black Americans' first experience of banking. Can...

The objective of this paper is to examine the absolute and risk-adjusted effects on distribution rates and total wealth created by adding loss-limiting trend following strategies to buy and hold portfolios. Using 150 years of equity and bond data, we found that applying trend following to...

Using a novel dataset consisting of daily futures prices going as far back as 1877, we find that returns of commodity futures indices have on average been positive over the long run. Though return premia are associated with both carry and spot returns, commodity returns in different economic...

The Société Générale de Belgique dominated the Belgian economy for more than 150 years. It invested for the long run in a portfolio of listed and private companies as the world’s first universal bank (pre-1935) and as holding company (post-1935). This paper presents a quantitative analysis...

This paper delineates how the telegraph was used in the financial services sector in the United States, and considers the implications of this use for U.S. economic growth, New York Stock Exchange trading volume, and securities market regulation. The parallel implementation of two separate...

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has attracted more attention than it perhaps deserves given that its main empirical claim, that wealth inequality is bound to occur in "capitalist" economies because the rate of return r is greater than the rate of economic growth g (r g), is not rigorously...

This study explores the current state and dynamics of the global Indigenous data sovereignty movement—the movement pressing for Indigenous peoples to have full control over the collection and governance of data relating to their lived realities. The article outlines the movement’s place...