We present new indices of the Paris stock exchange during the interwar period. We first discuss the conditions for stock market indices to be useful instruments both of long term capital productivity measure and of portfolio performance, especially for international comparisons. We show that...

French life insurance remained underdeveloped in comparison with other countries during a long period between 1870 and 1939. We show that technical peculiarities of the contracts used and their interaction with macroeconomic fluctuations explain the wide fluctuations we observe in insurance...

We show that the size of the French public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible to stabilize immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would have had no negative effects on income. The reason for the immediate...

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any...

This paper aims at giving an explanation of the changes in the number of bankruptcies during the second part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We firstly study the evolution of the French insolvency law and then we introduce some regional aspects. We indeed observe that the...