Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed.We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the lead-up to the crisis had a significant impact on banks' subsequent chances of experiencing distress. We document that high-risk banks -those operating highly-leveraged portfolios and attracting large quantities of deposits -were more likely to fail. Branching and international activities also increased banks' default probabilities. We measure the effects of board interlocks, which have been characterized in the extant literature as contributing to the Dutch crisis. We find that boards mattered: failing banks had smaller boards, shared directors with smaller and very profitable banks and had a lower concentration of interlocking directorates in non-financial firms.

This paper investigates the relation between financial flexibility and dividend smoothing policies.We use two proxies for financial flexibility; we measure levels of unused debt capacity and capital structure adjustment speeds. We find a nonlinear relation between unused debt capacity and dividend smoothing. For firms with high levels of unused debt capacity, this relation is positive.However, we find a negative effect for firms with low levels of unused debt capacity. Additionally, we show a positive relation between capital structure adjustment speeds and dividend smoothing.We find that firms absorb shocks to net income by changing their capital structure, and this change enables dividend smoothing. The effects we document are stronger for positive changes to a firm's net income.

This article investigates the effects of individual directors for corporate strategies and firm performance over the course of the 20th century for Dutch exchange-listed firms. We apply a multi-method approach on directors with many executive and supervisory roles in multiple firmsso-called big linkers. We first identify exceptional big linkers, board members whose presence is systematically related with firm characteristics. Our approach allows us to identify a number of exceptional individuals who were previously overlooked by business historians. Then we investigate the backgrounds of these exceptional big linkers. We find that their biographies and other archival materials provide explanations for their systematic relation with corporate outcome variables such as performance, debt and investments. Using additional information about these directors, including network centrality, bank relations and family histories, we are able to shed light on the multitude of explanations for the roles of exceptional big linkers.this is an open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-nonCommercial-noDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

The newly established South African Reserve Bank (SARB) was tasked to protect the currency by navigating the interwar gold standard, and, from March 1933, maintaining parity with the Pound Sterling. We find that South Africa's exit from gold secured an unparalleled and rapid recovery from the Great Depression. South Africa's exit was accompanied by an inextricable link of the SARB's policy rate to the interest rate set by the Bank of England (BoE). This sacrifice of independent monetary policy allowed the SARB to fix the country's exchange rate without impeding the flow of gold to London. The SARB fuelled the economy by reducing its policy rates and accumulating gold. Had South Africa not devalued, the country would have suffered a severe depression and persistent deflation. An alternative to the devaluation was for the SARB to pursue a cheap money strategy. By setting interest rates historically low, we find that South Africa could have achieved higher levels of economic growth, at the cost of higher inflation. Ultimately, South Africa's unparalleled recovery can be ascribed to the devaluation; however the change in the SARB monetary policy and the bank's control over the gold markets were of paramount importance.

This paper investigates the determinants of Dutch firms' dividend policies in the 20 th century. We identify three distinct episodes and document shifts in dividend policies in the 1930s and 1980s, because firm managers cater to the changing preferences of shareholders. The first episode, prior to the Second World War, was characterized by dividends that were fixed contracts between shareholder and management and the payouts were mechanically determined by earnings. The second epoch of Dutch dividend policy, until the 1980s, was characterized by dividend smoothing. Dividends were still strongly related to earnings, but because of shareholder's preferences for stable dividend income, earnings changes are incorporated in dividends with a lag. Finally, dividend policy in the most recent episode is inspired by shareholder wealth maximization, based on agency and signalling motives. In this period, dividends have become largely decoupled from earnings.