Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine share trading activity over the period 1882 to 1920 for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, one of the largest UK companies of the time. Our main finding is that the steady flow of rentiers into the shareholding constituency of this...

The paper presents time series for Danish general government net lending in the period 1875-2003 and analyses the long-term term fiscal development in Denmark. Even though Denmark today has one of the largest public sectors in Europe, relatively speaking, the Danish general government's deficit...

This paper constructs annual trade-weighted nominal and real effective exchange rate indices for Denmark covering the period since the introduction of the krone as the Danish currency unit in 1875. Two real effective krone rate indices with respectively wholesale prices and consumer prices used...

The paper constructs financial-account stock data for Denmark 1875-2005 on an annual frequency and explores the historical monetary and financial trends and cycles on the basis of the new data set. The annual financial-account data constructed in the paper are based on a comprehensive range of...

We offer a closer look at the frequency distribution of nominal price changes in the foreign exchange markets for a sample of 10 European exchange-rate pairs on the basis of a unique quarterly data set spanning 273 years. Our analysis clearly illustrates the risk of seriously underestimating the...

The paper reviews the empirical evidence regarding long-run relative purchasing-powerparity (PPP) convergence in the case of Denmark using simple unit-root tests and cointegration tests on new historical time-series indices for the effective krone rate since 1875. The results based on a real...

The paper paints a broad picture of the interest-rate development in Denmark since 1875. Three different short-term interest-rate series (the official discount rate, private banks' average deposit rate, and the market rate of discount/money market rate) and two different long-term interest-rate...

This paper offers a fact-oriented chronology of the Danish exchange-rate policy since the introduction of the krone as the Danish currency unit in 1875.

Does the combination of inflation and high corporate taxes explain the increase in bank leverage in the 20th century? Inflation automatically increases bank debt, while high corporate taxes hinder capital accumulation. Capital ratios therefore drop, until leverage-induced returns are sufficient...

Contrary to received wisdom, some recent studies report a negative relationship between leverage and profitability in banking in the 1980s and early 1990s. This study presents new data on the leverage and profitability of Swedish commercial banks in 1870-2001, and explores the sign of the...