Paris Stock Exchange 1870-1914 : financial information and portfolio choices.

Summary This thesis is composed of four chapters dedicated to the study of the Paris Stock Exchange and French investments between 1874 and 1914. It is based on a cliometric approach: the historical facts are analyzed by mobilizing the statistical and theoretical tools of financial economics.The first chapter participates in the rewriting of the history of financial economics. It demonstrates that French financial advice before 1914 was a proto-science, the premise of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) developed in the 1960s. He justifies the use, in the second chapter, of MPT to evaluate the rationality of international portfolio choices. We demonstrate the rationality of massive capital flows abroad and in particular to European countries. We find the rationality of the European preference of French investors and the bias of British investments in favor of the "new nations". The third chapter presents an unpublished database of monthly returns for all types of securities listed on the Paris Stock Exchange between 1874 and 1914. This is a reliable indicator of the performance of the Paris Stock Exchange and of public information in France over this period. In the fourth chapter, we make the first evaluation of the advice of the French financial analyst A. Neymarck (1913), on the eve of 1914. We show that the risk of each asset class is correctly perceived, the existence of a hierarchy of proposed portfolios according to the wealth of the investor and highlight the imperfections of this advice.