The Telegraph and Modern Banking Development

Real Effects of Information Frictions: When the States and the Kingdom Became United

“…The supply function should therefore be interpreted to be net of domestic demand. 21 The numerical predictions are robust to allowing for ad valorem instead of unit trade cost. if the observation is after the telegraph.…”

“…20 Shipping takes one period and costs τ per unit shipped. 21 Merchants are perfectly competitive and risk neutral. Aggregate consumer demand in LIV is stochastic and 19 The full set of results for the variance of exports normalized by average exports (similar to the coefficient of variation) is provided in the online Appendix.…”

Epidemic disease and financial development

“…This paper contributes to an emerging but rapidly expanding literature on history and finance (see D'Acunto, 2017 for a review). A common theme in this literature is to understand the historical roots of modern financial development, such as the passage of Public Law 280 in the United States (Brown et al, 2016), a change in the Catholic doctrine during the Italian Renaissance (Pascali, 2016), antisemitic violence in Germany (D'Acunto et al, 2018), the slave trade in Africa (Pierce and Snyder, 2017), the arrival of the telegraph in China (Lin et al, 2020) and the historical adoption of the plough across the developing world (An, 2020). Our examination of a historical epidemic disease suggests that the long-term impact of diseases on finance and operating mechanisms (i.e., trust) should be taken into account when designing policies to promote financial development.…”

Transportation Revolution and Banking Development：Evidence from Prewar China

“…Second, this study enriches the literature on the determinants of the development of the banking industry in modern China, such as banking entrepreneurship (Cheng, 2003), telegraph technology (Lin et al, 2021), and Confucian culture (Chen et al, 2021). We emphasize that in addition to these, railroads support the business innovation of China's modern banking system in the early 20th century.…”