“Technological revolutions are often accompanied by substantial stock price reversals, but previous literature has produced competing explanations for why this is the case. This paper brings new evidence to this debate using data from the innovation-driven British Bicycle Mania of 1895-1900, in which cycle share prices rose by over 200 per cent before collapsing by more than 75 per cent.”
“This vast war expenditure set in motion enormous numbers of entrepreneurs. Military investment provided an inexhaustible source of business opportunities, comparable only to consumer-driven trade expansion. While the latter has attracted attention from generations of historians, examining how this expansion of trade generated new venues of capital investment, new entrepreneurs and new ways of doing business, the knock-on effects of war-related state expenditure have remained a much less attractive topic.”
“News media plays an important role in modern financial markets. In this paper, we analyse the role played by the news media in an historical financial market. Using The Times’s coverage of companies listed on the London stock market between 1825 and 1870, we examine the determinants of media coverage in this era and whether there was a media discount.”
“Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collect over 500,000 monthly returns of British and foreign securities trading in London and the United States between 1866 and 1907. These heretofore-unknown data allow us to better quantify the historical benefits of international diversification and revisit the question of whether British Victorian investor bias starved new domestic industries of capital. We find no evidence of bias.”
