The recent world energy crisis raises serious questions about the extent to which the United States should increase domestic oil production and develop alternative sources of energy. We examine the energy developments in Brazil as an important experiment. Brazil has reduced its share of imported...

The NBER's pre-WWI chronology of annual peaks and troughs has the remarkable implication that the U.S. economy spent nearly every other year in recession, although previous research has argued that the post-Civil War dates are flawed. This paper extends that research by redating annual peaks and...

Most major American industrial business cycles from around 1880 to the First World War were caused by fluctuations in the size of the cotton harvest due to economically exogenous factors such as weather. Wheat and corn harvests did not affect industrial production; nor did the cotton harvest...

This paper presents new annual estimates of U.S. production of pig iron and imports of pig iron products dating back to 1827. These estimates are used to assess the vulnerability of the antebellum iron industry to foreign competition and the role of the tariff in fostering the industry's early...

Between 1807 and 1815, U.S. imports of manufactured goods were severely cut by Jefferson's trade embargo, subsequent non-importation measures, and the War of 1812. These disruptions are commonly believed to have spurred early U.S. industrialization by promoting the growth of nascent domestic...

The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine marked a turning point in American foreign policy. In 1904, President Roosevelt announced that, not only were European powers not welcome in the Americas, but that the U.S. had the right to intervene in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean...

Many states that formed the Southern Confederacy defaulted on sovereign debt sold in international capital markets during the 1840s. The Confederacy also elected President Jefferson Davis, who openly advocated the repudiation of U.S. states' debts while a member of Congress. Despite its poor...

Although it has been well established that financial volatility is related to news and macroeconomic shocks, there has been less emphasis on the importance of underlying economic and political stability. In this paper we study the behavior of consol returns since 1729 and identify a...

We introduce a new weekly database of spot and forward US-UK exchange rates as well as interest rates to examine the integration of forward exchange markets during the classical gold standard period (1880-1914). Using threshold autoregressions (TAR), we estimate the transactions cost band of...

There is a long-standing debate as to whether the Fisher effect operated during the classical gold standard period. We break new ground on this question by developing a market-based measure of general inflation expectations during the gold standard. Since the gold-silver price ratio was widely...