Finance: Past, Present and Future

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press . 

Marginal Revolution University has a great video on the Great Depression.

Marginal Revolution University has a neat video on the Fed as a lender of last resort.

In the video below, the folks from Marginal Revolution University take a look at Christmas from an economics perspective. The deadweight loss of Christmas was the title of a paper back in 1993 by Joel Waldfogel .

This week Michael Aldous , Laurence Mussio and I launched the Long Run Initiative (LRI). We have set up the LRI as a forum for academic experts, business leaders and public policymakers. It provides insights from the analysis of long-run experiences and trends to provide context and deepen understanding of the grand challenges facing businesses and government. LRI analysis focuses on where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. LRI is an initiative of the Queen's University Centre for Economic History .  You can read more about LRI at our website  and follow our blog . You can also follow us on Twitter @longinitiative .  

I'm interested in who invested in companies in the past. I've recently published a paper which looks at clientele effects in Victorian companies - who invested in what type of company and why. In a recent Queen's University Centre for Economic History working paper , I and three colleagues ask the question whether women shareholders in the age of the suffragettes were really making independent investment decisions. Using details on circa 500,000 railway shareholders, we produce the startling finding that women typically invested as solo investors whereas men typically invested together with other men. This implies that women were independent in the sense that they did not co-own shares along with men. Why did men typically co-own shares? We find evidence that men may have co-owned shares as a means of diversifying and a means of investing in non-local companies. Another interesting finding is that the shareholder lists placed an asterisk beside shareholders who owned en...

I have post over at the Economic History Society's blog - The Long Run - on the liquidity of the London capital Market before 1870. You can read the post here and the underlying paper is here .