This paper shows that 19th-century industrialization is an important determinant of the significant changes in Germany’s economic geography observed in recent decades. Using novel data on economic activity in 163 labor market regions in West Germany, we establish that nearly half of them...

Using new quarterly U.S. data for the past 120 years, I show that sudden reversals in equity and credit market sentiment approximated by several measures of corporate securities issuance are highly predictive of banking crises and recessions. Deviations in equity issuance from historical...

We document the importance of local information in mass media for the political engagement of citizens and accountability of politicians. We study this in the context of Canada, where until 1958, competition in television markets was suppressed-Canadians received either public or private...

This project re-investigates the hookworm eradication efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation's Sanitary Commission (RSC) in the American South during the Progressive Era. The RSC worked to eradicate hookworm across 11 southern states between 1911 and 1915, efforts that have been linked to...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers' acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass'...