The history of insurance has been characterized in most countries by the coexistence of a wide range of organizational forms. The reasons for this plethora of vehicles remain unclear, as does the impact of this diversity on the development of insurance around the world. Drawing on the latest research, this paper examines, first, the different functions of the state in relation to insurance in a wide range of national markets from the early modern period to the present century; second, the path-dependent effects that determined the historical distribution of public and private forms of insurance; and third, the relation between public and private insurance and its impact on market development.

In the 1950s, outdoor retailer Eddie Bauer donated down jackets to American mountaineers embarking on climbing expeditions in the Himalayas. In the 1990s, chemical manufacturer W. L. Gore & Associates donated both goods and $2 million to an expedition in Antarctica. The funds dedicated to sponsorship by the end of the twentieth century reflect a shift in how companies saw expeditions as useful to their marketing goals. This article uses two archives previously unexplored by historians that offer an unprecedented chance to compare sponsorship relationships in a single industry across decades. Commercial sponsorship of American expeditions and athletes has undergone three dramatic changes since 1950, and these shifts help explain how sponsorship as a form of marketing became so popular. Sponsorship contracts shifted from vague to specific as a result of decades of unsatisfying results for corporate sponsors. Sponsored athletes became business partners and began taking an active role in promoting the companies that provided them cash or donations in-kind. Finally, companies developed strategies for leveraging their sponsorship deals. The changing landscape of the business of expeditions ultimately reveals how the most long-lasting legacies of these extreme adventures happened far from the trail and much closer to company boardrooms, sponsorship managers’ offices and retail stores where consumers learned to engage with the narratives companies and athletes had crafted together.

We trace a corporate governance channel of bank shock transmission into the real economy. Using 1,245 U.S. bank enforcement actions (EAs) issued between 1990 and 2017, we show that when a nonfinancial firm (NFF) and bank share a common director, NFF stock prices fall around bank EAs. Severe EAs elicit more negative returns. During enforcement, valued directors substitute NFF board meeting attendance with bank board meeting attendance. Impaired credit relationships, director reputational damage, and endogenous director selection cannot fully explain our results. These findings imply that shared directors could transmit larger bank shocks into the real economy.

This article revisits the story of one the greatest financial frauds in history: Poyais. In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor issued bonds for this alleged fictitious Central American state on the London capital market. Putting together scattered evidence reveals a complex, multifaceted experiment undertaken by a private adventurer hoping to politically and economically position himself in a changing world. Poyais was a failed project to establish a settlement on a territory granted by an Indigenous leader and financed through British capital markets. Studying a financial failure provides nuanced insights into the political and legal frameworks defining origination processes of early nineteenth-century foreign loans. Following MacGregor’s actions entails drawing a story with contours that extend well beyond the City of London, revealing a rich set of transatlantic actors and spaces not known to be traditionally linked to the London-based capital market. The story of Poyais constitutes a window into the early financial dynamics of private colonialism and how these contributed to British imperial expansion. The Poyais loan appears as constituting a financial endeavor born from the encounter of different “worlds,” with MacGregor mediating these together but ultimately failing to legally and politically guarantee their lasting encounter.

This paper reassesses two conflicting hypotheses on the valuation impacts of private placements of equity (PPEs), the monitoring/certification hypothesis and the managerial entrenchment hypothesis, by focusing on the shareholder approval, active buyer, and premium pricing features of PPEs. We find that PPEs with these features have significant positive announcement returns and insignificant mean long-run returns, while the corresponding announcement and long-run returns for PPEs without such features are significantly negative. Firms with value-enhancing PPE features are better governed and use proceeds more efficiently. Thus, the heterogeneous nature of PPEs helps reconcile the puzzling return patterns and conflicting hypotheses regarding PPEs.

In this article, we use volatility surface data from options contracts to document a strong, robust, and positive cross-sectional relation between risk-neutral skewness (RNS) and subsequent stock returns. The differential return between high- and low-RNS stocks amounts to 0.17% per week. Preannouncement RNS is positively related to earnings announcement returns, and the positive RNS–return relation is more pronounced for other nonscheduled news releases. This suggests that it is informed trading that drives the positive relation between RNS and subsequent stock returns. We also find that RNS contains incremental information beyond trading signals captured by option-implied volatility and volume.