Mutual funds emerged as early as the second half of the 18th century in The Netherlands. The paper traces the history of mutual funds from the development of securitization in the 17th century to the invention of depository receipts in the 19th century. The apparent motivation for organizing the...

This article is written on the occasion of the bicentennial of the first state banks in North Carolina, and reviews the first one hundred years of banking in the state. The article is part of a larger project exploring the reasons for the remarkable success of North Carolina banks and attempting...

There is considerable variation across countries in both the extent to which large publicly listed firms are family-owned and the dominance of such family-owned firms in stock markets. The literature presents competing theoretical viewpoints on what influences such country-level variation. On...

This paper models stock returns as a function of three components: a constant expected return, the impact of the mechanism for executing trades, and a rational expectations error. We examine changes in these parameters using Goldfeld and Quandt's (1976) deterministic switching based on time....

The historical literature has traditionally paid much attention to the role of universal banking in the industrialization of Germany and has presumed, in line with Gerschenkron (1962), that the system gained preeminence in the late nineteenth century due to the general 'backwardness' of the...

In the 1950s and 60s, Alexander Gerschenkron claimed that banks facilitate economic growth among quot;backwardquot; countries. In 1990s and 2000s, many theorists similarly claim that banks promote growth. Banks do so by their superior monitoring and screening capabilities, they reason. Through...

During the 1990s, the differences between BIF-insured and SAIF-insured institution have declined. Due to mergers, over one-third of the deposits insured by the Savings Association Insurance Fund (SAIF) are now being held by Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) member institutions. This paper examines the...

During the 1990s, mergers of large banks have changed the industry dramatically, with the concentration amoung the 100 largest banking organizations increasing from 54.6 percent as of year-end 1990 or 72.6 percent as of mid-1990. This paper examines changes in the BIF's ability to remain solvent...