This article explores the financing of early industrial corporations using newly constructed panel data from Imperial Russian balance sheets. We document how corporate capital structures and dividend payout policies reflected internal agency issues, information asymmetries with external investors, life cycle considerations, and other frictions present in the Russian context. In particular, we find that widely held, listed and more profitable corporations were less reliant on debt financing. Asset tangibility was associated with lower debt levels, suggesting that Russian corporate debt was short-term, collateral was largely irrelevant, or agency problems dominated. Finally, we find that many of these same issues, for example ownership structure and access to securities markets, also mattered for financial performance and that dividends may have compensated investors for poor legal protections.

This article contributes to the literature analysing the role of public banks in crises. Taking the case of Spain, it analyses the behaviour of the public bank (ICO) between 1971 and 2015, specifically during two crises: the crisis of the 1970s, when Spain was an economically backward country coming out of a dictatorship; and that of 2008–13, by which time it had integrated into the international economy. Public credit underwent sweeping privatization in 1991, which translated into major downsizing. From then on, a gradual process of modernization began, mainly characterized by institutional changes in governance and access to resources. Our results indicate that public and private credit behave differently during recessions. Private credit always remains closely synchronized with the business cycle, but public credit less so.

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using cross-sectional variation in external finance dependence, we demonstrate that banks’ decision to not use the discount window and instead cut back lending and invest in safe assets can account for the majority of this decline. In effect, the banks ran on themselves before the crisis became evident.

In the follow-up to the 1926 political and monetary crisis in France, a new government led by Raymond Poincaré attempted to restore monetary stability by restructuring public debt. A sinking fund was missioned to withdraw short-term public bills from money markets. This policy disorganized the largest Parisian banks of the time, as they relied on these bills to manage their liquidity. Without developed domestic money markets, no other asset could absorb the excess liquidity freed by the withdrawal of these bills, and these leading banks faced a low-rate environment. In search of yield, they expanded their activities abroad a few months before the 1929 crash. These findings renew our understanding of the expansion of France's banking sector in the 1920s. In addition, they shed new light on the role of public debt in financial stability in an open economy.

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been an elevated interest in private debt and as a macroeconomic variable. In light of the lack of high-frequency data, this study presents a unique monthly time series dataset on credit from and deposits in Swedish commercial banks from 1875 to 2020, covering 1,752 monthly observations and most of Swedish commercial banking history. In a first application, the study examines to what extent money in Sweden has been exogenous, created independently of demand by the central bank, or endogenous, created in response to demand by commercial banks, during different institutional settings. The results, derived via cointegration and impulse-response functions, show that though the relationship between deposits and credit has changed over time, both theories often hold validity simultaneously. While changes in deposits often have had significant impact on credit, the opposite has also been true. There are, however, differences between different regulatory regimes, as well as for different groups of banks.

When Adam Smith – author of Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – was elected a professor at the University of Glasgow in 1751, he also joined an annuity ‘scheme’ that was unique for its time. The Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund, as it was known, offered members of the Presbyterian Church as well as the university a choice of levels at which to contribute investment savings, ranging from 2 to 10 percent of their wages. The life-contingent benefits were in the form of a reversionary annuity to a spouse and/or lump sum death benefit to children. This article (i) describes the scheme in financial and actuarial terms, (ii) values Smith's reversionary annuity and (iii) examines the choices made by individual participants. The specific research contribution is to compile the archival data to measure the extent of insurance anti-selection and to demonstrate that debates around choice architecture, default options and auto-enrollment, which infuse the literature in the twenty-first century, were prevalent in the mid eighteenth. For the record, Adam Smith actively contributed at the highest allowed rate, but it wasn't a ‘good’ investment for him, either ex ante or ex post. As for why, one must read the article.

This article explores the complex dynamics of financial innovation in early modern times, challenging linear models of temporal and spatial divisions that tend to shape our understanding of the evolution of financial systems. It supports the idea that innovation should be viewed as a non-linear and contextual process, involving diverse stakeholders and characterised by interactions and unexpected occurrences. The study focuses on the dissemination and trajectories of financial innovations, specifically the bill of exchange and its variation, the ricorsa, as well as the transferability and negotiability of commercial paper. It does so by investigating the interactions and exchanges between merchants and bankers from diverse backgrounds during the sixteenth-century Lyon fairs, using the archival records of one of the first Italian banks in Lyon (Salviati). The study reveals the mutual influence and acculturation among these agents and challenges the compartmentalisation of financial expertise. Through an analysis of transactions recorded in the Salviati bank's ledgers, the article highlights previously unknown uses of commercial paper by Southern merchant communities and discusses the factors that may have hindered the full-scale development of endorsement and discount in the Lyon trading networks, despite their potential benefits. The results provide insights into the intricate nature of financial innovation and the influence of structural and cultural factors on its development.

This article provides aggregate data on credit flows in Santafé de Bogotá, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador and western Venezuela). By perusing a thorough report submitted to Bourbon authorities on notarial transactions, which included both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical loans in the city, the article estimates the volume and size of lending activity while exploring how distinct types of credit interacted and shaped the business milieu of the region. It argues that by the late 1770s, Catholic Church lending had ceased to be the main source of investable funds in the region, with merchants and other non-ecclesiastical investors injecting growing funds into sectors traditionally avoided by ecclesiastical lenders such as commerce, mining and manufacturing. Network analysis suggests that merchants became brokers between different credit sources, alleviating information asymmetries and opening the credit market to borrowers with collateral and institutional restrictions willing to pay higher interest rates. Finally, by focusing on New Granada, the largest gold producer of the Spanish Empire, the article identifies some distinctive credit patterns that are different from those developed in silver-driven economies such as New Spain and Peru. Thus, the article provides new paths to study Latin American financial history.

This article reconstructs the history of direct interventions in exchange rate markets performed by the leading Italian banks of issue: the Banca Nazionale until 1893, then the Banca d'Italia between 1894 and 1913. The article shows that this type of operation represented a constant and relevant commitment for both institutions; interventions were made in the bills and/or the bonds market, sometimes also in conjunction with increases in the discount rate. Although often successful in the initial stages, until 1904 institutional provisions severely constrained the accumulation of foreign assets in the banks’ portfolios therefore reducing the viability, and hence the overall effectiveness, of these interventions.

This article studies a previously unknown asset market in eighteenth-century Sweden. It emerged as a result of a partial default in 1719, when large amounts of recently released fiat coins were converted into government liabilities. These could only be redeemed as a customs duty on international trade, the licent. As merchants had to acquire such assets to conduct their trade, tens of thousands of transactions were carried out on a secondary market over a period of more than 45 years. Networks of local merchants bought assets from initial holders and sold them on to intermediaries or merchants, who deposited the liabilities with a newly established government agency, the Debt Office. Here, hundreds of account holders could transfer the value of their deposits between them. When a licent payment was due, the amount was deducted from the merchant's account. Prices on the liabilities were low and sometimes volatile, but the long-term trend was rising. We have distinguished three types of market participants: a small group of very active users, most of them professional dealers or brokers; merchants who traded on a regular basis as they needed to pay the licent, or when a favorable opportunity appeared; and finally, those who traded sporadically. The emergence of this market was part of a financial expansion that occurred in many European countries at the same time, the closest equivalent being the segmented default in France after the abolition of John Law's system. This study aims to broaden our understanding of eighteenth-century financial developments, which have rarely been studied in a semi-peripheral European economy.

Mutual benefit societies evolved as the major provider for sickness, accident and life insurance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major problems facing insurers was the risk of adverse selection, i.e. that unhealthy individuals had more incentives than healthy individuals to insure when priced for the average risk. By empirically examining whether longevity among insured individuals in a nationwide mutual health society was different from a matched sample of uninsured individuals, we seek to identify the presence of adverse selection. We find no compelling evidence showing that unhealthy individuals were more likely to insure, or reasons to believe that problems related to adverse selection would have been a major reason for government intervention in the health insurance market in Sweden.

There is little research studying the effects of political violence on financial markets over decades, especially in an atmosphere where the violence manifested itself in heterogeneous and geographically widespread ways. This article examines the authoritarian edifice of Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century to examine the way in which capital markets perceived political instability in a country which had paradoxically strong financial institutions but weak political ones. Using a novel database on political violence in Russia in the nineteenth century matched to monthly financial data from Russian equity markets, this article provides strong evidence that Russia's financial markets were negatively affected in the long run by political violence. Consistent with modern views of financial information, the effects of political violence were quickly incorporated into asset prices, but the specific magnitude of such violence was different depending on where the violence occurred and in what manner. Overall, it appeared that political violence was perceived very negatively by investors in Russian equity markets.

How was Romania able to borrow cheaply on the international capital markets before World War I? We explore this within the context of its three southeast European neighbours, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, using a novel dataset of monthly bond prices from the Berlin and London stock exchanges. A comparison of country characteristics and panel data analysis suggests that Romania was able to borrow under more favourable conditions due to its abundant natural resources and desirable exports.