O.M.W. Sprague was America's leading expert on financial crises when America was debating establishing the Federal Reserve. His History of Crises under the National Banking Act is one of the most enduring legacies of the National Monetary Commission; a still frequently cited classic. Since the...

Founded in 1441, King's College was one of Cambridge University's wealthiest Colleges, endowed with a vast agricultural portfolio. John Maynard Keynes was appointed bursar just after WWI and initiated a major reallocation to equities, an innovation at least as radical as the late 20th century...

Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

Because of the obtrusive manner in which they are normally paid, property taxes are likely the most salient taxes in the U.S. However, they are much less salient to homeowners with tax escrow. Exploiting geographical variation in tax escrow, we test how salience affects property tax rates and...

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

Are firms' expectations systematically too optimistic or too pessimistic? Does it matter? We use micro data from the West German manufacturing subset of the IFO Business Climate Survey to infer quarterly production changes at the firm level and combine them with production expectations over a...

Micro- and macro-level evidence indicates that fluctuations in idiosyncratic uncertainty have a large effect on investment; the impact of uncertainty on investment occurs primarily through changes in credit spreads; and innovations in credit spreads have a strong effect on investment,...

This paper examines the interwar housing cycle in comparison to what transpired in the United States between 2001 and 2011. The 1920s experienced a boom in construction and prolonged retardation in building in the 1930s, resulting in a swing in residential construction's share of GDP, and its...

In the U.S. economy over the past twenty five years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight...