IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tky/fseres/2015cf994.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rethinking Corporate Finance Fables: Did the US Lag Europe before 1914?

Author

Listed:
  • Leslie Hannah

    (Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science)

Abstract

In 1914 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was only a modestly-sized equity market (considering it served what had for decades been the world's largest economy), but those deducing that overseas securities markets led the US miss the (non-NYSE) majority of US-quoted equity and the unusually high leverage of US corporations. As contemporaries understood, US corporate securities (especially bonds) had substantially increased in the decades before 1914 and those quoted nationwide naturally exceeded those of the smaller economies of France, Britain or Germany in absolute terms. A comparison of corporate finance in the four leading industrial economies-across the full spectrum of corporations and their securities-suggests conditional convergence on high ratios of stock exchange financing to GDP, led by the Anglosphere, but differently articulated in ways a) not captured by standard revealed preference modelling and b) with uncertain qualitative effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Leslie Hannah, 2015. "Rethinking Corporate Finance Fables: Did the US Lag Europe before 1914?," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-994, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    • Handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:2015cf994
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/dp/2015/2015cf994.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos & Janette Rutterford & Carolyn Keber, 2020. "UK investment trust portfolio strategies before the First World War," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(3), pages 785-814, August.
    2. Hannah, Leslie, 2017. "The London Stock Exchange 1869-1929: new bloody statistics for old?," Economic History Working Papers 82404, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:2015cf994. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CIRJE administrative office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ritokjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.