Capital Markets of the World 1850-2000

Following the acquisition by the Graduate Institute’s Library of a unique collection of stock exchange lists covering more than 40 markets in all continents for 150 years, the Institute is putting together a path-breaking project that will help push research in financial history towards a new frontier. The eventual goal is to produce three-tiered program involving:

• Full digitization of the stock exchange lists.

• Supervised, high quality collection of data series.

• Research programs and funding aimed at exploiting this unique dataset.

Outline of the project

The project is intended to provide the research world with a new, powerful research tool in financial history. Recent research has demonstrated the relevance of the information in stock prices for monitoring development in the global economy and the main obstacle that stands on the way of further, quicker developments is data access.

• Data access on these matters currently suffers from three shortcomings:

• Huge cost of access to data, lack of knowledge on the location of sources.

• Data difficult to disseminate and as a result replication difficult to achieve.

• Lack of modern procedures to accumulate and validate previous data. As a result, each research is “reinventing the wheel”.

The project is intended to help move research beyond this point and make full use of the latest technologies. Availability of sources should also generate a flow of research in areas that could not be investigated as easily before, with positive spillovers knowledge.

Read about the Historical Background and the Amazing Story of the Crédit Lyonnais Archive

The Future

The goal of the project is produce a powerful source in the history of finance. The next stages will involve:

• Digitization and circulation of the core series for circulation to the general public in partnership with 4digitalbooks, a leading developer of digitization products. Their equipment have been selected by leading libraries across the world such as Stanford, the National Library of Norway, or the University of Southampton.

• Putting together a Terabyte storage facility and development of a user-friendly source.

• Creation of an infrastructure and organization of efficient storage of the collections in the Library of the Graduate Institute in order to improve the currently limited accessibility.

• Fund-raising and the creation of partnerships for development.

• Discussion with curators of leading bank archives around the world who have expressed interest in joining the Graduate Institute infrastructure.

• We have also worked to identify relevant companies that provide digitization services in order to identify best practice.