Indexes of United States Stock Prices From 1802 to 1987

G. William Schwert

NBER Working Paper No. 2985 (Also Reprint No. r1514)
Issued in February 1991
NBER Program(s):   ME

Monthly stock returns from Smith and Cole [1935], Macaulay [1938] and Cowles [1939J are compared and contrasted with the returns to the CRSP value and equal-weighted portfolios of New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks. Daily stock returns from Dow Jones [1972] and Standard & Poor's [1986] are compared and contrasted with the returns to the CRSP value and equal-weighted portfolios of NYSE and American Stock Exchange (AMEX) stocks. Effects of dividends, nonsynchronous trading and time-averaging are analyzed. Splicing together the best indexes gives monthly data from 1802-1987 (2,227) observations) and daily data from 1885-1987 (28,884 observations.)

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Published: "Indexes of U.S. Stock Prices from 1802 to 1987." From Journal of Business , Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 399-426, (July 1990).

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