Business Activity and the Boston Stock Market, 1835-1869

Jeremy Atack and Peter Rousseau ()

No 103, NBER Historical Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines the performance of the Boston stock market, the nation's premier market for industrials, between 1835 and 1869, developing new indexes of price performance, dividend yields and total holding period returns for bank stocks and industrial equities using annual data from Martin (1871). Using these new series and a set of VAR models we conclude that disturbances in the banking sector, as manifested by declines in total stockholder returns, led to increases in short-term lending rates which in turn led to declines in the price performance of traded manufacturing firms. There is no evidence of feedback from manufacturing returns to bank stock prices via lending rates. The findings are consistent with a key role for banks in nineteenth century business fluctuations.

JEL-codes: N21 N11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-08
Note: DAE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/h0103.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: Business Activity and the Boston Stock Market, 1835-1869 (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberhi:0103

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/h0103
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Historical Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().