Who financed the great expansion of the Victorian equity market, and what attracted them to invest? Using data on 453 firm-years and over 172,000 shareholders, we find that the largest providers of capital were rentiers, men with no formal occupation who relied on investment income. We also see...

The London Stock Exchange was the largest capital market in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Britain also had numerous other stock markets based in provincial cities and towns. This paper provides the first in-depth quantitative assessment of these markets. We find that...

This paper presents new monthly capital gains, dividend yield, and total return indices for common equities quoted on British stock exchanges from 1829 to 1929. As well as creating an all-share index, we create a blue-chip index of the 30 largest companies, which we splice to the Financial Times...

The early twentieth century saw an increasingly vocal movement which campaigned for women to be able to exercise their political voices independently of men. This coincided with more women participating directly in the stock market. In this paper we analyse whether these female shareholders...

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...

This paper studies the effect of investor sentiment on the London stock market on a daily basis over the period 1899 to 2010. We use a broad mix of reporting from the Financial Times as our proxy for investor sentiment. The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, newspaper...

Using a novel dataset where all traders are identifiable, we examine trading in the shares of a major company on the London Stock Exchange before 1920. Our main finding is that bid-ask spreads increased in the presence of informed trades. However, we also find that spreads narrowed during...

Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine share trading activity over the period 1882 to 1920 for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, one of the largest UK companies of the time. Our main finding is that the steady flow of rentiers into the shareholding constituency of this...

Using a new dataset which contains monthly data on 1,015 stocks traded on the London Stock Exchange between 1825 and 1870, we investigate the cross section of stock returns in this early capital market. Unique features of this market allow us to evaluate the veracity of several popular...

Terrorism is a major issue in the 21st century. In this paper we examine the effect of terrorism on the stock market. We go beyond previous studies to explore the spectre of terrorism on the market rather than terrorist activities. Using a narrative-based approach à la Shiller (2019), we find...