Testing Asset Pricing Theory on Six Hundred Years of Stock Returns: Prices and Dividends for the Bazacle Company from 1372 to 1946

David le Bris, William Goetzmann and Sébastien Pouget

No 20199, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use the Bazacle company of Toulouse's unique historical experience as a laboratory to test asset pricing theory. The Bazacle company is the earliest documented shareholding corporation. Founded in 1372 and nationalized in 1946, it was a grain milling firm for most of its 600 year history. We collect share prices and dividends over its entire lifespan. The average dividend yield in real terms was slightly in excess of is 5% per annum, while the long-term price growth was near zero. The company's unique full-payout dividend policy allows us to estimate an asset pricing model with fundamentally persistent dividends and a time-varying risk correction. The model is not rejected by the data. Variations in expected future dividends are found to explain between one-sixth and one-third of variations in prices. Moreover, the risk correction is correlated with macroeconomic shocks, in particular with the volatility of grain prices.

JEL-codes: G12 N13 N23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: AP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20199.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20199

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20199

Access Statistics for this paper

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