John entered the MIT graduate program during the early, lofty days of the “new” economic history, and emerged as one of its most deft, sensible and versatile practitioners. His PhD dissertation—directed by Peter Temin—exemplifies the promise of this new approach to historical analysis....

Before the formation of the Federal Reserve, banking panics were routine events in the United States. During the most severe episodes, banks in cities across the country would often suspend or restrict the par convertibility of their demand deposit liabilities. In diagnosing the causes of the...

This book addresses the related problems of regulating and pricing access in network industries. Interconnection between network suppliers raises questions of how to sustain competition and realize economic efficiency. New entrants must have access to customers in a competitive industry, but the...

Combining theoretical work with careful historical description and analysis of new data sources, History Matters makes a strong case for a more historical approach to economics, both by argument and by example. Seventeen original essays, written by distinguished economists and economic...

This book challenges the static, ahistorical models on which Economics continues to rely. These models presume that markets operate on a "frictionless" plane where abstract forces play out independent of their institutional and spatial contexts, and of the influences of the past. In reality, at...

This paper reexamines a familiar problem in the literature of transportation economics: the impact of ICC rate regulation on the allocation of surface freight traffic among competing modes. A multinomial logit model is used to estimate the division of traffic manufactured commodities among...