What explains short term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18th century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and news came in on sailing boats that were...

This paper employs a natural experiment from financial history to study the process by which private information is incorporated into prices. I look at the market for English securities in the Netherlands during the 1770s and 1780s. Anecdotal evidence suggests that English insiders traded...

Financial markets are thought to be inefficient when they move too much relative to the arrival of information. How big is this inefficiency? In today's markets, this is difficult to determine because the arrival of information is hard to identify. In this paper, I present a natural experiment...

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a legal change had more...

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the 18th century that, in many dimensions, is simpler and closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at a number of English securities that...

What explains short-term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18th century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and news came in on sailboats that were often...

This paper employs a natural experiment from financial history to study the process by which private information is incorporated into prices. I look at the market for English securities in the Netherlands during the 1770s and 1780s. Anecdotal evidence suggests that English insiders traded...

Can differences in beliefs about politics, particularly the benefits of war and peace, move thick financial markets? During the Siege of Paris by the Prussian army (1870-71) and its aftermath, we document that the price of the French 3% sovereign bond (rente) differed persistently between the...