Military spending, fatalities, and the destruction of capital, all of which are immediately felt and are often large, are the most overt costs of war. They are also relatively short-lived. The costs of war borne by combatants and their caretakers, which includes families, communities, and the...

The institutional arrangements governing the creation of money in the United States have changed dramatically since the Revolution. Yet beneath the surface the story of wartime money creation has remained much the same. During wars against minor powers, the government was able to fund the war by...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...

The War for Independence left the National Government deeply in debt. The spoils from winning that war also gave it an empire of land. So, post-1783, was the National Government solvent? Was its net asset position, land assets minus debt liabilities, positive or negative? Evidence is gathered to...

This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the causal effect of politician race on public finance. I overcome the endogeneity between electoral preferences and black representation using the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an...