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.

This article argues that the British financial system in the era prior to World War I provides modern policymakers with a successful model of how to stabilize the banking system. This model had two components: incentives were structured to ensure that all banks that originated or traded assets on the money market sought only to trade in high-quality assets; and macro-prudential regulation promoted the segregation of money markets from capital markets, monitored the growth of money market credit, and restricted trade on the money market in assets issued by entities and sectors whose money market liabilities were growing so fast that the most reasonable explanation was that the money market was being used to finance longer-term investment. These facts indicate that policymakers can successfully stabilize the banking system through a combination of structural reform and regulation of the growth of credit.

I reconstitute the spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 from primary sources using forensic accounting techniques. I identify and analyze the methods for raising revenue to meet normal peacetime and emergency wartime expenses. I calculate the provincial tax burdens imposed on New Jersey's citizens. I identify how Britain interfered with New Jersey's fiscal structure. I estimate what the revenues and tax burdens would have been without this interference. New Jersey paid for war expenses by issuing bills of credit, spreading the tax burden of redeeming these bills into the future. New Jersey paid its yearly administrative costs with current property taxes and with current interest earnings from loaning paper money. In the absence of British interference and wars, New Jersey could have driven tax burdens to zero by using interest earnings to pay for all its provincial administrative costs.

There are a multitude of explanations for the depth and length of the Great Depression, of which uncertainty has been proposed as one possible explanation (Romer 1990). The 1930s not only saw extreme declines in output and prices, but stock volatility was also at record highs (Schwert 1989). This high stock volatility was generated by a series of discontinuous jumps as news about uncertainty arrived regularly during the 1930s, as shown by applying the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2006) test for jumps in a time-series. To provide a more historical narrative for these jumps, I outline some key events during the Great Depression that generated a sense of uncertainty for businesses and households which occurred contemporaneously to these extreme jumps. While much of the literature has placed Roosevelt's New Deal as a primary source of uncertainty, I do not find much evidence for this hypothesis, and instead find that banking crises, the breakdown of the gold standard, popular unrest and uncertainty related to the brewing war in Europe were primarily responsible for both jumps in returns and the uncertainty of the 1930s.

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.

In 1918 the United States Treasury delegated to the War Finance Corporation, a newly created off-budget federal agency, the task of buying Liberty bonds and later Victory notes in an effort to stabilize prices. Bayesian vector autoregression analysis of the security purchases indicates that the WFC purchases provided statistically significant price support, and marginally lowered bond yields while the program operated. Once WFC purchases ended, war bond yields increased substantially. Between bond issues, the Treasury financed its operations, including security purchases from the WFC, by issuing short-term debt, which affected the money market interest rate. The WFC's bond purchases are found to have a positive and significant impact on the call loan rate. Thus the WFC's bond purchases twisted the yield curve.

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.

The occurrence and unpredictability of speculative bubbles on financial markets, and their accompanying crashes, have confounded economists and economic historians worldwide. We examine the ability of the log-periodic power law model (LPPL-model) to accurately predict the end dates of speculative bubbles on financial markets through modeling of asset price dynamics on a selection of historical bubbles. The method is based on a nonlinear least squares estimation that yields predictions of when the bubble will change regime. Previous studies have only presented results where the predictions turn out to be successful. This study is the first to highlight both the potential and the limitations of the LPPL-model. We find evidence that supports the characteristic patterns as proposed by the LPPL-framework leading up to the change in regime; asset prices during bubble periods seem to oscillate around a faster-than-exponential growth. In most cases the estimation yields accurate predictions, although we conclude that the predictions are quite dependent on the point in time at which they are conducted. We also find that the end of a speculative bubble seems to be influenced by both endogenous speculative growth and exogenous factors. For this reason we propose a new way of interpreting the predictions of the model, where the end dates should be interpreted as the start of a time period where the asset prices are especially sensitive to exogenous events. We propose that negative news during this time period results in a regime shift and the bursting of the bubble. Thus, the model has the ability to predict sensitivity to exogenous events ex ante.

The British monetary authorities tried to encourage lower long-term interest rates through their government debt management operations between 1962 and 1964, following the Radcliffe report's recommendation that they should have an objective for long-term rates, and with the intention of supporting the government's pursuit of faster economic growth. The implementation of the policy was complicated by the Bank of England's role as a market maker in the government securities market, and beset by misunderstandings among the monetary authorities. The policy was abandoned when the conditions of strong market demand for bonds on which it depended changed. The article describes how the policy was developed and implemented, and the impact of political preferences on it.

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.

Land reform and its financial arrangements are central elements of modern Irish history. Yet to date, the financial mechanisms underpinning Irish land reform have been overlooked. The article outlines the mechanisms of land reform in Ireland and the importance of land bonds to the process. Advances worth over £127 million were made to tenant farmers to purchase their holdings. These schemes enabled the transfer of over three-quarters of land on the island of Ireland. The article introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It illustrates the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. The article finds a high level of state banking in Ireland: large issues of land bonds were held by state-owned savings banks.

Adaptation to the consequences of climate change has developed into a growing field of concern for the insurance business. However, climate-related risk is not entirely a new field in insurance. Historically, a large number of insurance organisational choices and strategies have been used to mitigate the financial impact of extreme events and uncertainties associated with climate change. Taking the case of forests in Sweden, this article reviews the ways in which climate-related risks such as storm/wind and fire risks have been assured. The study shows that climate-related risks have generally increased over time and that major hazard events have been decisive for strategy and organisation choices. Twentieth-century developments show that corporate insurance coverage increased due to higher levels of anticipated risk, while self-insurance and public insurance were reduced. However, in more recent times the expansion of corporate insurance has stagnated. Increased premiums and tighter terms following historically extreme weather events have led government and forest owners to assume more climate risks.

This article deals with savings banks and the extent to which they encouraged workers to save. A study of probate inventories from three Swedish towns shows that just 20–30 per cent of workers had assets in savings banks during the second half of the nineteenth century. Saving patterns differed greatly among groups of workers. Savings banks were most important for unskilled, unmarried women, but married workers were more likely to invest in, for example, real estate (1870s) and insurance (1900s). Family considerations greatly affected saving decisions, which detracted from the appeal of savings banks. Their emphasis on individual saving was more suitable for those who needed a flexible alternative to use for different saving needs. This flexibility also made it easier for savings banks to meet growing competition and can explain why they continued to attract workers in the twentieth century. Although savings banks never dominated the workers' saving arena, they probably promoted unmarried workers' awareness of the advantages of saving. Consequently, since all married workers had previously been unmarried, savings banks most likely contributed to fostering saving habits among the working class.

In this article, we analyse geographical, occupational and kinship ties amongst apprentices and their masters of the London Goldsmiths’ Company in the second half of the seventeenth century, at a time when the profession was undergoing radical change, thus forming the cradle of British banking. Systematic comparisons of social capital of the guild's two subgroups (the ‘Bankers’ and the ‘Craftsmen and Retailers’) show few such ties at entry and only slightly more amongst office-holders. Overall, ‘Bankers’ display slightly greater social ties in the company overall. Hypotheses for such patterns are discussed, including activity specificity, wealth and position in the guild and households’ economic strategies. The article calls for a household-based approach to economic choices as opposed to one focusing on the guild.