Ottoman stock returns during the Turco-Italian and Balkan Wars of 1910-1914

by Avni önder Hanedar (Dokuz Eylül University and Sakarya University, Turkey) and Elmas Yaldız Hanedar (Yeditepe University, Turkey)

Were the military conflicts of 1910–1914 related to higher risks for market investors at the İstanbul Stock Exchange? Wars are often perceived as bad news, correlated with increasing risks for investors and fluctuations in volatility: there would be fall in stock prices due to expected macroeconomic costs, such as higher inflation and lower production, as companies’ activities and expected returns decrease. On the other hand, if wars’ outcomes were perceived as unimportant for companies’ activities and expected returns, then there would be no significant changes in stock prices and volatility.

Many researchers on financial economics have created a large literature on the effects of different wars, and addressed mixed findings. A pioneering research for the political crises of 1880–1914 is Ferguson (2006), contributing to answering how did investors at the London Stock Exchange view the conflicts on the eve of the First World War. He showed the absence of higher war risk on bonds of Great Powers[1] traded on the London Stock Exchange. In addition, Hanedar et al. (2015) evince that the outbreak of the Turco-Italian and Balkan wars were correlated with a lower likelihood of Ottoman debt repayments, using data on two Ottoman government bonds traded on the İstanbul bourse. As the literature on the İstanbul bourse is limited, new light on this question required to explore risk perceived by stock investors due to the historical conflicts.

We focus on the influence of stock returns at the İstanbul bourse during the Turco-Italian and Balkan wars, using unique data on stock prices of 9 popular domestic joint-stock companies in the Ottoman Empire. All these companies played a crucial role for the Ottoman economy and operated in the most attractive sectors, i.e. banking, mining, agriculture, and transportation. Some of them are the Ottoman General Insurance company (Osmanlı Sigorta Şirket-i Umûmiyesi), the Regie (Tobacco) company (Tütün Rejisi), and the Imperial Ottoman Bank (Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şâhâne). The data are manually collected from Tanin, which was a widely circulated daily Ottoman newspaper. This research is the first to provide a historical narrative explaining the changes of Ottoman stock returns due to the wars that took place on the eve of the First World War. It observes only small reactions to the Turco-Italian war, and only for three stocks out of ten examined (see Table 1). This is interesting, as previously (Hanedar et al., 2015) we observed higher responsiveness of government bond prices during the same period.

It would be possible to argue that investors might have believed that the war would not be that harmful for the non-governmental economic and financial sectors. An important aspect supporting the finding is that the companies were either established or supported by foreign investors. Great Powers protected their home countries’ investments both economically and politically. The companies obtained revenue guarantees and privileges from the Ottoman state, making the investors’ investments secure. Great Powers that invested in the Ottoman Empire were expecting its demise soon. Therefore, investors were likely to invest in the companies just for the sake of having territorial claim without much consideration of risk. During the nineteenth century, wars were important sources of the solvency problem, which could explain the sensitivity of government bond prices to the conflicts studied here.

The working paper can be downloaded here

References to this blog post here

[1] The UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary.