Building upon exhaustive research of extant and often fragmentary contemporary resources, this paper provides a thorough analysis of financial options trading and sales in interwar Czechoslovakia. Whilst focusing primarily on a remarkable bucketshop episode occuring in the late twenties and...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the sustainability of public debt in Italy during the last 150 years (1861-2010) by employing a database containing several statistical novelties: new time series estimates of public debt and GDP (respectively Bank of Italy and Baffigi, 2011) and an original...

This paper discusses the instrument of equalisation claims, which has successfully been used in two previous German debt crises as a method for stabilizing the balance sheets of financial institutions. A modern version of this method would swap temporarily illiquid assets for government bonds...

The paper emphasizes the transition in Russia and the role institutions played before and during the process. In Russia, a big bang approach was applied. That is to say, transition was conducted all of a sudden, omitting important underlying reforms. This practice should function as a shock...

This essay discusses trends in new banking history scholarship. It does so by conducting bibliometric content analysis of the entire literature involving the history of banks, bankers and banking published in all major academic journals since the year 2000. It places this recent scholarship in...

This paper introduces the Data Collection Task Force of the South-East European Monetary History Network (SEEMHN DCTF) and its first result. Good policy making should be grounded on good data. To this end, the SEEMHN DCTF works since 2006 towards establishing a SEE macro history database of 19th...

This chapter presents historical evidence about Swedish stock prices, dividends, and yields on government fixed-interest securities. Monthly returns are presented since 1901 for stocks, since 1874 for government long-term bonds and since 1856 for short-term Treasury bills or central bank...

Im Zuge der Analyse jüngerer Finanzkrisen wird auch den Krisen der Vergangenheit vermehrte Aufmerksamkeit zuteil, so auch der deutschen Bankenkrise von 1931. Ein Phänomen, das dabei bisher wenig Beachtung fand, ist der massive Rückkauf eigener Aktien, der im Vorfeld der Krise insbesondere...

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this paper examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. This implies that ownership...

This paper introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It outlines the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. These government-guaranteed bonds arose during a period when the possibility of...