Contagion and financial integration during the interwar period: the example of the Paris Bourse.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to revisit, in the light of unpublished historical financial data, certain results of the economic history literature concerning the spread of the Great Depression to Europe, and more particularly to France. In particular, we seek to study the various international transmission channels - stock markets, banks and currencies - of this crisis and evaluate the respective roles they may have played in the spread of this crisis to the French financial markets. The different contributions we propose in this thesis are above all empirical and are based on a significant amount of work carried out upstream to collect and process original financial data, mainly from the archives of the Paris Stock Exchange. Several important results emerge from our work. Our analysis of the stock markets shows, first of all, that the American stock market crash of 1929 had a weak impact on the Paris stock market. Similarly, the French banking system as a whole resisted the banking crisis of the early 1930s rather well, due in particular to the high degree of specialization that characterized it at the time. Finally, we show that the level of financial integration between the United States, France and Belgium, through the study of bilateral relations between the equity markets of these three countries, tended to strengthen with the adoption by these countries of the gold exchange standard. This strong financial integration, coupled with the economic policy constraints associated with this monetary system, could thus explain how the Great Depression spread in Europe and why the economic crisis was prolonged in countries such as France and Belgium, compared to other major economies.