In theory, banning short selling stabilizes stock prices but undermines pricing efficiency and has ambiguous impacts on market liquidity. Empirical studies find mixed and conflicting results. This paper leverages cross-country policy variation during the 2020 Covid crisis to assess differential...

We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock returns. We use a new weekly hand collected sample of 136 firms that traded on the NYSE and new mortality data to assess the impact of four waves of the flu on stock returns. We find that the second and fourth waves of the pandemic...

In light of the recent state of global financial markets, the practice of short selling has come under increasing scrutiny. While financial institutions argue that short selling is a necessary mechanism for price discovery and contributes significantly to market liquidity, regulators view it as...

In theory, banning short selling stabilizes stock prices but undermines pricing efficiency and has ambiguous impacts on market liquidity. Empirical studies find mixed and conflicting results. This paper leverages cross-country policy variation during the 2020 Covid crisis to assess differential...

Russia and Germany both industrialized later than England and the United States, and both countries retained authoritarian autocracies until World War I. But the two countries diverged in their regulation of industrial corporations during the mid-19th century, with Russia retaining strict...

We investigate the liquidity effects of the short sale bans enacted by six European countries in March 2020 in response to the declining market brought about by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Comparing stocks subjected to these bans to those in other European countries that did not...

We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock prices. We use the death rate to control for the impact of the global pandemic and war news reported in the New York Times to capture the positive effects of the end of World War I on stock prices. Using a new weekly hand collected NYSE...

The sources of finance for industrial development include (i) banks, (ii) securities markets, (iii) internal finance, (iv) alternative sources of finance such as angel finance, trade credit, families, and friends, and (v) governments. All four countries had sophisticated financial systems and...

This book examines the origins of modern corporate finance systems during the rapid industrialization period leading up to World War I. The study leads to three sets of conclusions. First, modern financial systems are rooted in the past, are idiosyncratic to specific countries, and are highly...