We use a mean-variance approach to address the classic puzzle of British capital export in the 19th century. Our analysis shows that foreign securities listed in London offered significant diversification benefits to British investors. In simple terms, international diversification reduced risk. Conservative estimates of the optimal investment portfolio for a domestic investor suggest that the balance between foreign and domestic security offerings on the London Exchange was close to what classic equilibrium models of asset prices would suggest.

This paper establishes liquidity linkage between stock and Treasury bond markets. There is a lead-lag relationship between illiquidity of the two markets and bidirectional Granger causality. The effect of stock illiquidity on bond illiquidity is consistent with flight-to-quality or flight-to-liquidity episodes. Monetary policy impacts illiquidity. The evidence indicates that bond illiquidity acts as a channel through which monetary policy shocks are transferred into the stock market. These effects are observed across illiquidity of bonds of different maturities and are especially pronounced for illiquidity of short-term maturities. The paper provides evidence of illiquidity integration between stock and bond markets.

Previous studies of Treasury market illiquidity span short time periods and focus on particular maturities. In contrast, we study the time series of illiquidity for different maturities over an extended period of time. We also compare time-series determinants of on-the-run and off-the-run illiquidity. Illiquidity increases and the difference between spreads of long- and short-term bonds significantly widens during recessions, suggesting a “flight to liquidity,” wherein investors shift into the more liquid short-term bonds during economic contractions. Macroeconomic variables such as inflation and federal funds rates forecast off-the-run illiquidity significantly but have only modest forecasting ability for on-the-run illiquidity. Bond returns across maturities are forecastable by off-the-run but not on-the-run bond illiquidity. Thus, off-the-run illiquidity, by reflecting macro shocks first, is the primary source of the liquidity premium in the Treasury market.