In the 16th century, North America contained 25-30 million buffalo; by the late 19th century less than 100 remained. While removing the buffalo east of the Mississippi took settlers over 100 years, the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo on the Great Plains were killed in a punctuated slaughter...

Why did per capita income divergence occur so dramatically during the 19th Century, rather than at the outset of the Industrial Revolution? How were some countries able to reverse this trend during the globalization of the late 20th Century? To answer these questions, this paper develops a...

The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger...

The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During...

We examine the distributional consequences of trade using the New World Grain Invasion that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. We use a newly-created dataset on population, employment by sector, property values, and poor law transfers for over 10,000 parishes in England and Wales...

This paper uses U.S. loan-level credit register data and the 2018-2019 Trade War to test for the effects of international trade uncertainty on domestic credit supply. We exploit cross-sectional heterogeneity in banks' ex-ante exposure to trade uncertainty and find that an increase in trade...

This paper quantifies the positive and normative impact of Bretton Woods capital controls on global and regional economic activity. A three-region DSGE capital flows accounting framework consisting of the U.S., Western Europe, and the Rest of the World (ROW) is developed to quantify capital...

This paper studies how international trade influences U.S. presidential elections. We expect the positive employment effects of expanding exports to increase support for the incumbent's party, and job insecurity from import competition to diminish such support. Our national-level models show for...