Risk Premia Reconsidered: Illiquidity and Selection Bias for Stocks and Corporate Bonds in the pre-World War I period (with Justin Case and Eline Poelmans)
Illiquid assets only appear in the historical trading record when they happen to trade, which turns the price lists into a selected sample. Correcting for this lowers the equity and corporate bond risk premia (flattening the risk-return relationship) and creates type-1 errors in historical cross-sectional asset-pricing studies.
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Railroad Bailouts in the Great Depression (with Lyndon Moore)
The RFC had two goals with its bailouts: increase employment and decrease the likelihood of bond defaults. They failed on both counts, and mostly raised the wages of the workers already employed.
Journal of Economic History, 2026, Volume 81, Issue 1, pp. 182-217
Selected conferences: LSE-UC Davis Economic History seminar, University of Tilburg, Australian National University, and University of Melbourne
News coverage: De Tijd, EABH Podcast, La Libre Belgique, RNZ, Trends, and VRT NWS
Don't Mention the War: Business Creation and War Fears in Belgium's Second Industrial Revolution (with Marc Deloof and Leentje Moortgat)
The threat of war is enough to hold back an economy, even when war never comes. Firm creation and capital raised both fell as the fears of war escalated in pre-1914 Belgium.
Business History, 2026
Selected conferences: Baden-Württenmberg Workshop in Economic History, BERD (Louvain-La-Neuve), EHES (Paris), and EBHA Annual conference (Rotterdam)
Risk Management in Deadly Times: The U.S. Life Insurance Industry in the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic (with Gustavo S. Cortes)
Life insurers more exposed to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic charged higher prices on new policies. This, together with a surge in demand for coverage, kept the industry out of financial distress.
Economic History Review, 2025, Volume 78, Issue 4, pp. 1202-1230
Selected conferences: CEPR Macro Economic History, EHA Annual Meeting (Arizona), and EHS Annual Meeting (Warwick)
EBES Best Paper Runner-Up Award
News coverage: Bloomberg
Video coverage: Econ Coffee Simulator, KU Leuven FEB Talk, and Video Summary
Banking on Innovation: Listed and Non-listed Equity Investing, Evidence from Société Générale de Belgique, 1850-1934 (with Marc Deloof)
The world's first universal bank pioneered a second innovation: investing in non-listed equity. It earned significant risk-adjusted returns doing so, offsetting the flat performance of its listed stocks and bonds.
Explorations in Economic History, 2024, Volume 93
Selected conferences: Financial History Workshop (Brussels)
News coverage: VFB - De Beste Belegger
Scuttle for Shelter: Investor Flight-to-Safety and Political Uncertainty during the Spanish Second Republic (with Stefano Battilossi & Stefan Houpt)
Political uncertainty during the Spanish Second Republic pushed investors out of stocks and into government bonds. Stocks moved with their exposure to that uncertainty, but not as if investors thought a Soviet-style revolution was coming.
European Review of Economic History, 2022, Volume 26, Issue 3, pp. 423–447
Selected conferences: EHS Annual conference, EHA Annual conference, Iberometrics, Paris School of Economics, and Queen's University Belfast
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Go Active or Stay Passive: Investment Trust, Financial Innovation and Diversification in Belgium's early days (with Jan Annaert)
The world's first closed-end equity fund offered the less wealthy investors diversification, but no more than a randomly selected underdiversified portfolio would have. Wealthy investors could do better on their own, so the trust never attracted the money it needed to survive.
Explorations in Economic History, 2021, Volume 79
Selected conferences: Paris School of Economics and Financial History Workshop (Online)
News coverage: Investor Amnesia and Trends
Managers cut dividends and postponed IPOs when war news intensified, arguably to build a war chest. Investors reacted negatively, with mean reversion after a threat of war but a negative drift after an actual one.
Journal of Economic History, 2020, Volume 80, Issue 3, pp. 629-669 (lead article)
Selected conferences: ASSA (Atlanta), EHS Annual Conference (Belfast), University of Notre Dame, and University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
News coverage: Investor Amnesia, Knack, and EHS - The Long Run
The Asset-Pricing Implications of Selection Neglect: Evidence from Global Fine Wine Auctions
Assets only trade when someone wants to sell, so the observed returns overstate what a fixed portfolio actually earned. Wines where this gap is largest go on to underperform, consistent with sidelined investors mispricing what they cannot see.
Journal of Banking & Finance, forthcoming
Selected conferences: AAWE (2024), UNSW, University of Adelaide, University of Queensland, and New Zealand Finance Meeting (2024)
News coverage: Financial Times, HLN, and WineFi Podcast
Featured in The Passion Portfolio
Companion paper: The Economic Costs of Selection Neglect: Evidence from Global Fine Wine Auctions (Economics Letters, 2026)
Dividend growth and return predictability: a long-run re-examination of conventional wisdom (with Jan Annaert and Marc Deloof)
Dividend growth is robustly predictable over 165 years of Brussels data, contrary to the conventional wisdom. Dividend smoothing, not economics, explains why previous studies missed it.
Journal of Empirical Finance, 2019, volume 52, pp. 112-127
Selected conferences: AFFI (Paris), EHES (Tübingen), Finance and History Workshop (Utrecht), and German Congress for Economic History (Bonn)
News coverage: Trends, Investment Officer, and Investor Amnesia