This paper provides quantitative evidence on interbank transmission of financial distress in the Panic of 1907 and ensuing recession. Originating in New York City, the panic led to payment suspensions and emergency currency issuance in many cities. Data on the universe of interbank connections...

Which firms relied on commercial banks for credit and which firms did not at the onset of the Great Depression would seem to be an important question given the vast literature discussing banking distress in the United States during the 1930s. The question, however, has not been answered. This...

We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical U.S. data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both government spending and GDP. We then...

We ask (1) why the United States adopted the car more quickly than other countries before 1929, and (2) why in the United States the car changed from a luxury to a mass market good between 1909 and 1919. We argue that the answer is in part the success of the Model T in the United States and its...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century - the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. Those series evolved through many iterations. This essay reconstructs the series from 1895 to 1935 and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis