We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that...

The Inca Empire was the last of a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America. It stretched across parts of the current territories of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and the whole of Peru. The Inca Road was its 30,000-kilometer-long transportation system....

We use 1940 Census data to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital for children born in the 1920s and educated during an era of expanding but unequally distributed public school resources. Looking at the gains in educational attainment between parents and children, we document...

Using data on 25 major American cities for the period 1900-1940, we explore the effects of municipal-level public health efforts that were viewed as critical in the fight against food- and water-borne diseases. In addition to studying interventions such as treating sewage and setting strict...

How might COVID-19 affect human capital and wellbeing in the long run? The COVID-19 pandemic has already imposed a heavy human cost--taken together, this public health crisis and its attendant economic downturn appear poised to dwarf the scope, scale, and disruptiveness of most modern pandemics....

What are the medium- to long-term effects of pandemics? How do they differ from other economic disasters? We study major pandemics using the rates of return on assets stretching back to the 14th century. Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for about decades, with real...

Confederate monetary reforms encouraged holders of Treasury notes to exchange these notes for bonds by imposing deadlines on their convertibility. We show that Confederate funding acts aimed at precipitating the conversion of currency into bonds did temporarily suppress currency depreciation....

This paper examines fifteen historical episodes of stock market crashes and their aftermath in the United States over the last one hundred years. Our basic conclusion from studying these episodes is that financial instability is the key problem facing monetary policy makers and not stock market...

We assemble new data on the British and French concessions in Shanghai between 1845 and 1936 to assess the legal origins view of financial development. During this period, two regime changes altered the degree to which the British common and French civil law traditions held jurisdiction over the...

The Gold Pool (1961-1968) was one of the most ambitious cases of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions - sharing profits and losses - to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was in fact tied to...