Since World War II, Germany’s stock market has been mostly an after-thought, despite a highly successful economy. Why might this be the case? Explanations have included the power and influence of banks, the stakeholder-oriented nature of Germany’s economy and Germany’s civil law heritage. In Law, Politics and the Rise and Fall of German Stock Market Development, 1870-1938 we argue, based on statistical analysis of a hand-collected dataset of initial public offerings (IPOs), that a combination of law and politics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a significant role in the evolution of German equity markets. For most of this period Germany had, contrary to the present-day pattern, a stock market that was sizeable in comparative terms. The law helped to foster this trend but legal reforms during the Nazi era reversed matters in a way that had lasting consequences.

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The role that regulation should play in the development of securities markets is much debated and a persistent lull in initial public offerings helped to prompt some deregulation through the enactment of the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. While the appropriate scope of public regulation of securities markets is a contentious issue and while the market for newly listed firms can be a bellwether for the development of public equity markets, the empirical literature on regulation of IPOs is small and generally inconclusive. In our paper, Regulating IPOs: Evidence from going public in London and Berlin published on SSRN, we use history to offer insights concerning regulation of IPOs and the development of public equity markets. In particular, we draw upon hand-collected Initial Public Offering (IPO) datasets to undertake a comparative study of the London and Berlin stock markets between 1900 and 1913, a period that coincides with the apogee of an era of global financial development unmatched until the end of the 20^th century.

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