The institution of slavery displays a puzzling historical pattern: it is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, in horticultural societies, and less frequently among hunter-gatherers and societies at more advanced agrarian stages. We explain this rise-and- fall pattern...

This article studies how equity ownership and corporate control were separated in the United States. Initially, railroads and industrial firms were tightly controlled by a few shareholders; this situation was altered in the 1890s by massive mergers and reorganizations, which allowed private...

The origins of Wall Street are tied to Alexander Hamilton's plans for the financing of the new nation and the funding of its debt. The two hundredth anniversary of Wall Street in 1992 occasioned many retrospectives that owe more to mythology than to historical veracity. Wall Street's earliest...

In this paper we show that the spread of the classical gold=20 standard in the late nineteenth century increased international trade=20 flows. This positive effect was compounded whenever a group of countries=20 formed a monetary union. Applying the gravity model of trade to more than=20 1,100...

What is the optimum quantity of money in a society? This paper answers this question both from the perspective of a utility maximizing model with real balances in the utility function, and employing an inventory theoretic model which focuses attention on the costs of transacting in different...