The Coevolution of Banks and Corporate Securities Markets: The Financing of Belgium's Industrial Take-Off in the 1830s

Stefano Ugolini

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Recent developments in the literature on financial architecture suggest that banks and markets not only coexist, but also coevolve in ways that are non-neutral from the viewpoint of optimality. This article aims to analyse the concrete mechanisms of this coevolution by focusing on a very relevant case study: Belgium (the first Continental country to industrialize) at the time of the very first emergence of a modern financial system (the 1830s). The article shows that intermediaries played a crucial role in developing secondary securities markets (as banks acted as securitizers), but market conditions also had a strong feedback on banks' balance sheets and activities (as banks also acted as market-makers for the securities they had issued). The findings suggest that not only structural, but also cyclical factors can be important determinants of changes in financial architecture.

Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg
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Published in Business History, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2019, pp.1-22

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http://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11023 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Coevolution of Banks and Corporate Securities Markets: The Financing of Belgium’s Industrial Take-Off in the 1830s (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:1906.11023

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