British government bonds formed the deepest, most liquid and most transparent financial market of the nineteenth century. This article shows that those bonds had long periods, extending over decades, of anomalous behavior, in which Consols, the largest and best known of these instruments, were noticeably overpriced relative to equivalent securities which offered the same interest rate and the same guarantee of payment. This finding and similar ones for other comparable pairs of British gilts appear to provide the most extreme counterexamples documented so far to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and to the Law of One Price, and point the way to further investigations on the origins and nature of the modern economy.

Before the founding of the Federal Reserve, bank clearinghouse associations served as an emergency lending facility during the National Bank Era (1863–1913). This article clarifies the operation of clearinghouse loan certificates during panic periods. If clearinghouse loan certificates do not circulate among the general public, then they bear similarities to interbank loans among clearinghouse member banks. In general, the central clearinghouse organization does not act alone as a lender of last resort to make loans from the central clearinghouse to individual member banks.

This study analyzes how the colonial rice trade in prewar Japan affected its rice market, considering several government interventions in the two rice futures exchanges in Tokyo and Osaka. We explore the interventions in the futures markets using two procedures. First, we measure the joint degree of efficiency in the markets using a time-varying vector autoregression model. Second, we examine historical events that possibly affected the markets and focus on one event at a time. The degree of efficiency varies over time within our sample period (1881-1932). The observation, together with historical analysis, leads to the following conclusions: (1) the two major markets in Tokyo and Osaka were nearly efficient; (2) government interventions involving the delivery of imported rice from Taiwan and Korea often reduced futures market efficiency; finally, (3) this relationship continued as long as the quality difference between imported and domestic rice existed. The government interventions that promoted domestic distributions of the colonial goods resulted in confusion in the commodity markets, and decreased efficiency of the markets in the metropole.

Financial historians have devoted considerable attention to the investment behaviour of urban politicians in the market for public debt in the Low Countries. They have focused not only on how many urban officials invested in annuities, but also why they did so. On the one hand, it has been suggested that political elites often had political and economic motivations for investing in urban annuities. By contrast, historians from the institutional school defend the thesis that inclusive governance led to broader participation in the market for urban credit. A variable that has gone largely unnoticed in explaining investments by the political elite is the impact of the changing composition and social profile of the ruling elites on their investment behaviour. In this article, I examine the case of sixteenth-century Ghent to argue that changes in the city's power structure resulted in profound changes in attitudes towards public debt management. While the old political elite in the early sixteenth century prioritised selling annuities to individuals who belonged to the political networks of their time, the group of political newcomers that dominated urban politics at the end of the sixteenth century had much more of a market-oriented attitude, giving priority to non-political investors in the free market.