The nineteenth-century US whaling industry: Where is the risk premium? New materials facilitate updated view

• Barbara L. Coffey ^[1]
  1. [1] Princeton University

     Princeton University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: International journal of maritime history, ISSN 0843-8714, Vol. 33, Nº. 2, 2021, págs. 344-363
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • Materials that were born digital, and printed materials that have been digitized, have aided an updated examination of nineteenth-century US whaling voyages’ financial returns. Items included the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset from whalinghistory.org, The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, a congressman’s speech and a state’s census reports. These works and others, with analysis, showed that for the 11,257 analysable voyages ending in the 1800s, the mean return was 4.7% and 4.6% for whaling and US government bonds, respectively. Ideally, this work will place the nineteenth-century US whaling industry returns in context of other investments.