This paper describes an effort to extend the record of US stock market returns past the 1871 terminus of the Cowles (1938) data familiar from Schiller (2015). I combined the archival data supplied by Goetzmann, Ibbotson and Peng (2001) with data supplied by Sylla, Wilson and Wright (2006), and...

Little is known about the performance of the US stock market before 1802, and evidence for the years following 1802 through the 1830s remains scanty. This paper describes a new database on total returns in the US stock market for the first fifty years of its existence, constructed in large part...

From 1857 scholars have relied on Macaulay (1938) to track changes in interest rates during the period before the Ibbotson data begin. Holding period returns, where of interest (e.g., Siegel 1992a, 1992b), have been calculated from summary yield inputs such as those tabulated by Homer (1963),...

US securities markets took root after Alexander Hamilton's refunding of the Federal debt in the early 1790s. Accordingly, a market in bonds has been in operation in the US for over two centuries. Until recently, however, little was known about bond market returns prior to 1857. This paper...

Bond prices from 1897 to 1926 have not been compiled. Financial historians have made do with yield series offered by Macaulay (1938) or with yield summaries found in Durand (1942), Hickman (1958), or Homer (1963). Where holding period returns have been of interest (Siegel 2014), these have been...

Siegel (2014), Shilling (2015) and others rely on the work of Alfred C. Cowles to capture US stock market returns before 1926. Cowles in turn relied on Frederick Macaulay's work for data on railroad stocks during this era. This study attempts to re-construct Cowles' index from the ground up, by...