Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? Are there long run consequences? During the farm land price boom and bust before the Great Depression, we find that credit availability directly inflated land prices. Credit also amplified the relationship between positive fundamentals...

Agriculture on the American Great Plains has been constrained by historical water scarcity. After World War II, technological improvements made groundwater from the Ogallala aquifer available for irrigation. Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access...

Using historical census and survey data, Long and Ferrie (2013) found a significant decline in social mobility in the United States from 1880 to 1973. We present two critiques of the Long-Ferrie study. First, the data quality of the Long-Ferrie study is more limiting than the authors...

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known case of slow diffusion-and show that the...

Agriculture on the American Plains has been constrained historically by water scarcity. Post-WWII technologies enabled farmers over the Ogallala aquifer to extract groundwater for large-scale irrigation. Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access...

The 1930's American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. Analyzing new data collected to identify low-, medium-, and high-erosion counties, the Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land...

Greater historical perspective is needed to enlighten current debate about future human responses to higher temperatures and increased precipitation variation. We analyze the impact of climatic conditions and variability on agricultural production in five semi-arid western states. We assemble...

The governance and transaction cost insights of Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985, 1996, 2010) and Ronald Coase (1937, 1992) have framed antitrust polices and firm management strategies. Transaction cost economics explain efficient governance adaptation. With a focus on private efficiency gains...

I show that buyer power of firms could either increase or decrease their technology adoption, depending on the direction of technical change and on which input markets are imperfectly competitive. I examine this relationship empirically in a setting that features both concentrated labor markets...

Carbon intensity from fossil fuel use in the United States economy peaked in 1917. World War I ended, and the Spanish Flu pandemic broke out one year later in 1918. This paper contends that these events, coupled with associated turmoil in the domestic coal industry, were largely responsible for...