The Provincial Stock Exchanges, 1830—1870¹

Private Benefits, Public Vices: Railways and Logrolling in the Nineteenth-Century British Parliament

“…To evaluate firm performance, we collected daily share prices from the Railway Monitor, a railway price list published by the Economist, and aggregated the data up to weekly observations in order to deal with the fact that many firms were only occasionally quoted. The price data was pooled across exchanges, as certain companies were more frequently quoted in Leeds, Liverpool, or Manchester than London (Killick and Thomas 1970). We use as an observation window the period after the completion of the parliamentary approval process, from the end of the 1846 parliamentary session (28 August) until the end of 1847.…”

Stock markets, banks and economic growth in the UK, 1850–1913

“…This exclusion might introduce a degree of measurement error in the underlying data before 1870, which is difficult to adjust for given the limited amount of surviving information from provincial exchanges. However, it should be noted that several provincial stock markets saw subdued activity for at least two decades following the end of the Second Railway Mania in 1846, so the measurement error induced by their exclusion is unlikely to be large (Killick and Thomas 1970). As will be explained below, the methodology employed in this study also mitigates issues with bias that may exist in the earlier part of the sample.…”

Stock exchange competition: the case of Geneva during the interwar period

“…They show that Lyon managed to get the largest share of trades for provincial exchanges, jumping from a market share of provincial trades of 30 per cent in 1871 to 59 per cent in 1913. For the United Kingdom, Killick and Thomas (1970) list stockbroking firms in 13 provincial cities in 1861. The gradual evolution from many local exchanges to a few national exchanges (or just one) has taken over a century to materialise in most countries.…”