Sovereign debts are often subject to payment suspension. Default, i.e. the financial incapacity to fulfil the debt service, and repudiation, i.e. the denial by a sovereign to recognize its legal obligations, are normally used to explain these payment suspensions. Intuitively, for bondholders,...

Prices of repudiated bonds are insightful but scarcely observed. Based on an original daily database, this paper compares the price evolution from January 6, 1916 to August 31, 1919 of a cross-listed (Paris and London) Tsarist bond repudiated by the Soviets on February 8, 1918. After its...

During World War II, the art market experienced a massive boom in occupied countries. The discretion, the inflation proof character, the absence of market intervention and the possibility to resell artworks abroad have been suggested to explain why investing in artworks was one of the most...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries’ money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the...

The market portfolio efficiency remains controversial. This paper develops a new test of portfolio mean-variance efficiency relying on the realistic assumption that all assets are risky. The test is based on the vertical distance of a portfolio from the efficient frontier. Monte Carlo...

During World War II, the art market experienced a massive boom in occupied countries. The discretion, the inflation proof character, the absence of market intervention and the possibility to resell artworks abroad have been suggested to explain why investing in artworks was one of the most...

Art is often used as an investment vehicle. Given the importance of market efficiency in finance, we use a large auction-based index to test whether the art market is weakly efficient. Evidence reveals that returns on artworks exhibit high positive auto-correlation. We attribute this result to...

History provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults. This article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective. It then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with...