Pioneers of Financial Economics: Volume 1

Edited by Geoffrey Poitras, Professor of Finance, Simon Fraser University, Canada

• Contents:IntroductionGeoffrey PoitrasPART I: THE HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND1. Commercial Arithmetic, Theology and the Intellectual Foundations of Jacob Bernoulli’s Art of ConjecturingEdith Dudley Sylla2. Issac Le Maire and the Early Trading in Dutch East India Company SharesJ.G. van Dillen, Geoffrey Poitras and Asha Majithia3. Joseph de la Vega and the Confusion de ConfusionesJosé Luís CardosoPART II: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONTRIBUTIONS4. Life Annuity Valuation: From de Witt and Halley to de Moivre and SimpsonGeoffrey Poitras5. John Law: Financial InnovatorAntoin E. Murphy6. Duvillard’s Researche sur les Rentes (1787) and the Modified Internal Rate of Return: A Comparative AnalysisYuri Biondi, translated by Jeff d’Avignon and Geoffrey PoitrasPART III: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ‘SCIENCE OF FINANCIAL INVESTMENTS’7. Rational Investors, Informative Prices: The Emergence of the ‘Science of Financial Investments’ and the Random Walk HypothesisAlex Preda8. Economic Instruments and Theory in the Construction of Henri Lefèvre’s ‘Science of the Stock Market’Franck Jovanovic9. A Nineteenth-Century Random Walk: Jules Regnault and the Origins of Scientific Financial EconomicsFranck JovanovicPART IV: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONTRIBUTIONS10. Louis BachelierRobert W. Dimand and Hichem Ben-El Mechaiekh11. Vincenz Bronzin’s Option Pricing Theory: Contents, Contribution and BackgroundHeinz Zimmermann and Wolfgang HafnerIndex