We use the Bazacle company of Toulouse's unique historical experience as a laboratory to test asset pricing theory. The Bazacle company is the earliest documented shareholding corporation. Founded in 1372 and nationalized in 1946, it was a grain milling firm for most of its 600 year history. We...

We document a sequence of institutional innovations associated with the corporate form over the course of several centuries in Toulouse. Shareholding companies that began in the 11th century formally incorporated themselves into two large-scale, widely held firms by 1373. In the years that...

We study crashes using data from 101 global stock markets from 1692 to 2015. Extremely large, annual stock market declines are typically followed by positive returns. This is not true for smaller declines. This pattern does not appear to be driven by institutional frictions, financial crises,...

The first global financial bubble in stock prices occurred 1720 in Paris, London and the Netherlands. Explanations for these linked bubbles primarily focus on the irrationality of investor speculation and the corresponding stock price behavior of two large firms: the South Sea Company in Great...

In this paper, we estimate the behavioral component of the Grinblatt and Han (2002) model and derive several testable implications about the expected relationship between the preponderance of disposition-prone investors in a market and volume, volatility and stock returns. To do this, we use a...

The asset allocation of university endowments has recently shifted dramatically towards alternative investments. In this paper we examine the role played by strategic competition in motivating this shift. Using a metric capturing competition for undergraduate applications, we test whether...

This paper quantifies the scale and scope of the commercial real estate mortgage bond market in the period surrounding the 1920s in an attempt to better understand the role of retail mortgage debt in early urban development. In particular, this paper quantifies the size of the market, identifies...

Due to imperfect transparency and costly auditing, trust is an essential component of financial intermediation. In this paper we study a sample of 444 due diligence (DD) reports from a major hedge fund DD firm. A routine feature of due diligence is an assessment of integrity. We find that...

We use traded options on growth and value indices to test for clientele differences in risk preferences. Value investors appear to have exhibited a higher average level of risk aversion than growth investors for two different time periods in the late 1990's and early 2000's. We construct a model...

This paper argues that econometric analysis of housing price indexes before 2006 generated forecasts of future long-term price growth and low estimated probabilities of extreme price decreases. These forecasts of future increases in home-loan collateral values may have affected both the demand...