“We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mis-pricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we investigate the forecasting power of the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio for these sectors.”
“Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain and Ireland, 19th Century Canada, and 20th Century Australia and Singapore.“
“We study corporate bond default rates using an extensive new data set spanning the 1866–2008 period. We find that the corporate bond market has repeatedly suffered clustered default events much worse than those experienced during the Great Depression. For example, during the railroad crisis of 1873–1875, total defaults amounted to 36 percent of the par value of the entire corporate bond market.”
“We evaluate the importance of “Limits to Arbitrage” to explain profitability of momentum strategies. Specifically, when the availability of arbitrage capital is in short supply, momentum cycles last longer, and breaks in momentum cycles are shorter. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings with a unique database of stock returns from 1866-1907 London and the CRSP database.”
Spend hours looking through Duke University’s archive of early advertisements in America. Products range from ‘Non-Explosive Lamps’ to ‘Life Preserving Coffins’, specifically designed for ‘doubtful cases of death’.”
