We ask (1) why the United States adopted the car more quickly than other countries before 1929, and (2) why in the United States the car changed from a luxury to a mass market good between 1909 and 1919. We argue that the answer is in part the success of the Model T in the United States and its...

The consensus view among economic historians is that wage inequality in American manufacturing followed an inverted-U path from the early nineteenth century until just before World War Two. The previous literature, however, has been unable to fully document this path over time, or fully assess...

We estimate the urban wage premium in the United States from 1940 to 2010. Drawing on recent advances in the literature on selection on unobservables, we show how to control for heterogeneity in the characteristics of individuals that choose to live in cities to address endogenous sorting....

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

Income and home ownership both surged in the United States between 1940 and 1960. We use cross-place variation in changes in real income to assess the importance of income gains to the mid-century home ownership boom. OLS and IV estimates suggest that a large share of the overall increase in...

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...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century - the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative analysis using fresh research on the impact...

We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical U.S. data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both government spending and GDP. We then...