William N. Goetzmann

Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies 
Faculty Director, International Center for Finance · Director, SOM Executive M.B.A. in Asset Management

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William Goetzmann is the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies, the faculty director of the International Center for Finance and director of the SOM Executive M.B.A. in Asset Management.

Goetzmann is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served as the president of the Western Finance Association and the European Finance Association. He teaches courses in investments, real estate and financial history. He is an expert on financial markets and securities, investment strategies, investor behavior and financial history.

His published books include: Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton University Press, 2016), The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. (Yale University Press, 2013), The Origins of Corporations: The Mills of Toulouse in the Middle Ages, ed. (Yale University Press, 2015), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created the Modern Financial Markets (Oxford, 2005), The Equity Risk Premium: Essays and Explorations, with Roger Ibbotson (Oxford, 2006), Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis, with Elton, Gruber & Brown (John Wiley and Sons, 2006 and following), and The West of the Imagination, with W. H. Goetzmann (Oklahoma University Press, 1986 & 2009).

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International Center For Finance at the Yale School of Management

An interdisciplinary research center at Yale for the study of Finance. The ICF sponsors a number of academic conferences during the year on current issues in Finance. It provides data to its fellows for research and fosters intellectual interaction among scholars at Yale and in other schools who work on Financial issues. 

Academic Vitae

Outside Activities, Consulting and Director Relationships

The Old Exchange, Amsterdam (Emanuel de Witte, c.1653)

Money Markets: A 3,000-Year History An interactive history of the world’s exchanges — 320 marketplaces across 10 regions and three millennia, from the Forum of Pompeii to the modern bourse, mapped and searchable by name, city, era, or country.

Interactive world map — 320 exchanges by era

The Structure of Historical Financial News

Full-text analysis of the financial press across three markets and roughly 150 years, quantifying how news shifted from terse price records to narrative-driven reporting. Non-negative Matrix Factorization recovers interpretable topics and measures semantic drift in the core vocabulary of finance.

London FT & IMM

St. Petersburg Russia

Shanghai treaty-port

Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth Century

Jorion & Goetzmann’s database of monthly capital-appreciation indexes for 39 markets, 1919–1996, in both US-dollar and inflation-adjusted terms. An interactive explorer lets you click markets on and off to compare their long-run paths, with the underlying Excel and CSV files free to download.

The Origins of the Corporation

With David le Bris and Sébastien Pouget — six centuries of share prices from the Bazacle company of Toulouse (1372–1946), one of the world’s first joint-stock corporations. An interactive chart, the documentary record from the Toulouse archives (the founder’s share, the mills, the registers), and downloadable data.

The First Financial Bubble: London, Paris & the Netherlands, 1720

With Rik Frehen and Geert Rouwenhorst — a daily database of share prices from the three markets caught up in the world’s first international stock-market bubble. An interactive chart of the South Sea, Mississippi and Dutch companies rising and crashing together, the satirical prints of the Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid, and downloadable data.

The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720

William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst and Timothy Young (Editors), Robert Shiller (Foreword). Yale University Press, Yale Series in Economic and Financial History

My colleagues and I edited a volume about the first global financial crisis and the book that recorded it. The world.s first global stock market bubble suddenly burst in 1720, destroying the dreams and fortunes of speculators in London, Paris, and Amsterdam virtually overnight. Their folly and misfortune inspired the publication of an extraordinary Dutch collection of satirical prints, plays, poetry, commentary, and financial prospectuses entitled Het groote Tafereel de Dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly), a unique and lavish record of the financial crisis and its cultural dimensions. The current book adopts the title. It is a book about the book, a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaboration that uncovers the meaning and influence of the Tafereel and the profound, lasting, and multifaceted impact of the crash of 1720 on European cultures and financial markets.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible

Princeton University Press, 2016. A sweeping history of finance and its part in the growth of civilization — from the temple accounts of ancient Mesopotamia and the financial machinery of imperial China and Rome to the joint-stock companies and sovereign debt of early-modern Europe. The argument: finance is a technology of time, a way of moving value across the centuries, and it has been one of the driving forces of human history. Errata.

The Equity Risk Premium: Essays and Explorations

Roger Ibbotson and I have assembled our separate and co-authored research papers related to the equity risk premium into a volume. We have added additional new work and interpretive material.

The Origins of Value: the Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets Geert Rouwenhorst and I have edited a volume of essays for the International Center for Finance called, published by Oxford University Press. It contains chapters by leading historians and economists on key innovations in finance from earliest times to the present. It is based on a series of conferences on financial history at the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. It draws significantly from the new History of Finance Collection, a joint venture between the Yale Beinecke Library and the Yale School of Management.s International Center for Finance. Find the book at Oxford University Press. Buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Hear the Marketplace Interview about The Origins of Value. Also, here are the reviews: The Times, Time Magazine, Financial Times, Barron.s The Best Books of 2005 Frankfurter Allgemeine, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Financial Innovation

Financial History at the International Center for Finance

The ICF has been constructing databases of individual security prices in global markets over the 19th and 20th centuries. These data are freely available for downloading at the ICF website. Now available:

Old New York Stock Exchange Project

Monthly individual NYSE stock prices from 1816 to 1926 and annual dividend data for much of the same period. See A New Historical Database for the NYSE 1815–1925: Performance and Predictability for a data description and some evidence on predictability.

London Stock Exchange Project

The Investor’s Monthly Manual contains a complete record of the London Exchange from 1869 to 1930. Monthly individual securities data may be downloaded in spreadsheet form. It includes corporate securities and sovereign and municipal debt from all over the world.

St. Petersburg Stock Exchange Project

Monthly data for all equities on the St. Petersburg Exchange, 1865 to 1917; PDF files of the hard copy in Russian are available. See the associated paper, Momentum in Imperial Russia (Journal of Financial Economics, 2018).

Shanghai Stock Exchange Project

Monthly data for equities on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, 1870 to 1940.

Dow Theory — The Hamilton Agent

Stephen Brown, Alok Kumar and I studied the performance of the Dow Theory over 1903 to the present, using the market editorials of William Peter Hamilton to simulate the returns an investor following the theory would have earned (working paper; Journal of Finance, 1998).

This new site reimagines that work as a daily AI agent. Each US trading day after the close, the agent ingests current market indicators and retrieves the four 1903–1929 Hamilton editorials whose market state is most similar to today’s by FEVA distance. Claude Opus then writes a Hamilton-voiced editorial diagnosing the primary trend, secondary movement, and rails–industrials confirmation.

Six reader-archetype rules translate the diagnosis into daily long-DJI position weights, and a scoreboard reports each archetype’s running performance under Sharpe, Sortino, maximum drawdown, MPPM, and the Henriksson–Merton timing coefficient. The site regenerates from an audit-trail JSONL and republishes automatically via GitHub Actions.

An Introduction to Investment Theory

A hyper-text book for first-year MBA and MPPM students introducing the basic models of investment theory. Designed to be used in an eight-week first course in investments.

The History of Finance and Capital Markets

A Yale College seminar based on documentary resources at Yale and beyond. The course meets in Yale.s Beinecke Library and makes extensive use of the financial history collection. Overview, People, Readings, On-line Resources, Syllabus, Virtual Museum of Financial History. The virtual museum is a work in progress and contributions and comments are welcome.

Henry Lowenfeld.s _Investment and Exact Science published in London in 1909 developed the first complete theory of_ international diversification. It is worth reading to understand how British investors of the last century thought about risk._ Right is the image Lowenfeld used to show the idea of co-movement within a single market. The book_ is out of copyright, so feel free to download it here._ Thanks to Andrey Ukhov for rediscovering Lowenfeld.s pioneering work in Yale.s Mudd Library._ Also by the same author:_ Investment Practically Considered, and All About Investment.

Galileo.s Financial Calculator

In 1606, Galileo published this guide to a calculation device of his own design called a geometric and military compass. Among the various uses of the device is the calculation of compound interest. The Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence has a full description of the tool. Click on the document at right for the complete text see operation VII.

Michael Edelstein.s book Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism is the first major study to use modern portfolio theory to examine the question of British overseas investment._ His work is based on the construction of time series indices from the Investors Monthly Manual._ He has generously made the data appendices from his book available for download through the website of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management.

The Entemena Inscription in the Yale Babylonian Collection

is the oldest know example of compound interest calculation. It dates from about 2,500 BCE and commemorates the defeat of the city of Umma by the city of Lagash. Lagash claims reparations for decades of occupation of the agricultural land along the border. The reparations are calculated by compounding at 33 1/3 percent per year. View the 3-D scan of the cone digitized by Yale’s Peabody Museum.

Finance in the Oxyrhnchus Papyri: An early bank check?

Document 2772 in The Oxyrhnchus Papyri volume XXXVI_ is entitled .Instructions to a Banker.. Written in 10 or 11 A.D., it is part of the famous trove of papyri documents discovered in Egypt in the last century and now in the process of preservation and translation at Oxford University . see POxy (Oxyrhynchus Online).

Translation:_ .Julius Lepos to Archibius the banker greeting. Pay to my account with Harpochration the banker one thousand nine hundred and fifty three drachmas of silver. Total 1953 dr year 40 of Caesar, Pachon 3..

The text suggests that Julius and Harpochration both have accounts with the banker Archibius and Julius is instructing the transfer from one account to the other. It is one of a number of diagraphs from papyri collections.

Hawara Documents

The West of the Imagination A new edition from Oklahoma University Press, 2009.

We have added several new chapters to our book. Additions include chapters on McKinney and Hall, The Land Artists, New Western Photographers and much more. The West as seen through the eyes of artists is the West of the imagination. This book is a comprehensive survey of the iconlogy of the Western Frontier in the popular and high arts in America. 

About Town: A New Look at Yale and New Haven

Overland Press, 1977. My first book — color drawings of the university and the city, with Tom Hendricks and an introduction by Frank Logue. Above: the bustling intersection of York and Elm Streets.

Snow Spiral: An Environmental Project.

Will + Zoe — Design Differently

A design venture offering boldly colored, geometrically patterned silk ties. Design differently.

A Portfolio of Paintings of Egypt

Some paintings of classic Egypt views. Feel free to link them, but do not download, since they are copyrighted.

The Arcadian Landscapes of Edward Sheriff Curtis

An essay for a Whitney Museum exhibition, The Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West. The photographs of Edward Curtis helped reshape the image of southwestern tribes in the American imagination. See also "Desolation is the Great Basin: Clarence King's Fortieth Parallel Survey" by my father, historian William H. Goetzmann. This essay, which focuses on the documentary photography of Timothy O'Sullivan, also appears in the Whitney catalogue.

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William N. Goetzmann
Yale School of Management · 165 Whitney Avenue · New Haven, CT 06511
william.goetzmann@yale.edu

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