In the discussion of our contemporary economic disease, the Great Depression analogy refuses to go away. Almost every policy-maker referred to conditions that had ‘not been seen since the Great Depression’, even before the failure of Lehman. Some even went further – the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England notably called the crisis the worst ‘financial crisis in human history’. In its April 2009 World Economic Outlook, the IMF looked explicitly at the analogy not only in the collapse of financial confidence, but also in the rapid decline of trade and industrial activity across the world. In general, history rather than economic theory seems to offer a guide in interpreting wildly surprising and inherently unpredictable events. Some observers, notably Paul Krugman, have concluded that a Dark Age of macroeconomics has set in.

We have reconstructed a new blue chips (large caps) stock index for France from 1854 to 1998, based on a modern methodology. Our index differs profoundly from earlier indices, and is more consistent with French financial and economic history. We suggest this result casts some doubt on many historical stock indices, such as those used in Dimson, Marsh and Staunton's Triumph of the Optimists. Investment in French stocks provided a positive real return during the nineteenth century, but a negative one – because of inflation and wars – in the twentieth. Despite this secular negative real performance, stocks proved the best financial asset in the very long run, although with an equity premium lower than in the US.

The French government currently honors a very unusual debt contract: an annuity that was issued in 1738 and currently yields €1.20 per year, payable to the descendants of its original recipient. I tell the story of this unique debt, which serves as an anecdotal but symbolic summary of French public finances since the eighteenth century. Created by a powerful nobleman for one of his servants, it survived the turmoil of the French Revolution, became part of the public debt and has been scrupulously honored to this day, even though its value has been eroded away by decades of inflation.

There is a large literature that aims to explain what determines country risk (defined as the difference between the yield of a sovereign's bonds and the risk free rate). In this article, we contribute to the discussion by arguing that an important explanatory factor is the impact that commodities have on the capacity to pay. We use a newly created database with state-level fiscal and risk premium data (between 1891 and 1930) to show that Brazilian states with natural endowments that allowed them to export commodities that were in high demand (e.g. rubber and coffee) ended up having higher revenues per capita and lower cost of capital. We also explain that the variation in revenues per capita was both a product of the variation in natural endowments (i.e. the fact that states cannot produce any commodity they want) and a commodity boom that had asymmetric effects among states. These two effects generated variation in revenues per capita at the state level thanks to the extreme form of fiscal decentralisation that the Brazilian government adopted in the constitution of 1891, which gave states the sole right to tax exports. We also run instrumental variable estimates using indices of export prices for each state. These estimates confirm our findings that states with commodities that had higher price increases had lower risk premia.

Utilising a new sample of interwar initial public offerings (IPOs), I consider the effectiveness of the interwar stock market for firms going public. Consistent with the pecking order theory, IPO proceeds contributed only modestly to domestic industry's capital expenditure needs. IPOs of capital-hungry new manufacturing industries raised no more finance than did the rest of manufacturing. This was in part attributable to the detrimental effect of weak financial regulation on investor appetite for newer, riskier enterprises. In terms of the quality of firms allowed onto the market, IPO survival rates of the early and late 1920s were shockingly low, just as earlier research has shown. However, survival rates rebounded strongly in the following decade due not only to the economic recovery but also to tougher scrutiny of listing applications by the London Stock Exchange.

Based on archives of the French brokers, the French finance ministry and the occupying forces, this article analyses the motivations of the legal changes imposed on the French exchanges during the war. Most of the measures taken by the Vichy government were meant to stimulate the demand for French state bonds. Three main tools were used to render stocks as unattractive as possible: forced registration, imposition of a maximum threshold for stock prices and taxation. The article suggests that forced registration and the cap on maximum prices were the most efficient tools.

This article examines the formation, function and economics of unincorporated, or private, bankers' networks in long-distance payments during the 20 years leading up to the Civil War. Using historical evidence from both the center and the periphery, I find that the private bankers' networks played an important role in the interregional circulation of currency and in the issuance and clearing of deposits and drafts. In the 1850s, as the private bankers' networks were adapted to the mobilization of long-term financial capital, their role in long-distance payments began to diminish. This pattern of specialization was reinforced by the financing of the northern government's effort in the war of the states.

The article is based on a unique data set of securities traded on the Madrid Bolsa and the Zurich Börse between 1902 and 1925. We examine the pricing of liquidity and demonstrate that the liquidity level of securities was an important determinant of cross-sectional returns. Factors that are usually found important in contemporary markets, such as securities' sensitivity to market-wide liquidity shocks and market movements, turn out to have been irrelevant in the early twentieth century. In addition, the illiquidity of the Madrid market appears to have modestly slowed capital raising there. Our results suggest that market liquidity was an important determinant of the growth and development of financial markets.

In this article we investigate supply and demand factors that have been put forward to explain the growth of fire insurance markets in Sweden during the financial revolution. We show that income growth and urbanisation fostered the demand for fire insurance. The supply of fire insurance, on the other hand, helps explain financial market development. Fire insurance assisted in mortgaging fixed assets, such as houses, through guaranteeing them as collateral. On both the supply side and the demand side, fire insurance was a key factor of the financial revolution in Sweden.

This brief survey gives an overview of the research on Japanese financial and monetary history based on the records of the Bank of Japan Archives. We briefly describe the Bank of Japan's organizational history, the activities of the Archives, their history and the classification of documents preserved in the Archives. We finally survey the recent research in Japanese economic history from the viewpoint of materials in the Archives.