Resources to fight the War for Independence from Great Britain (1775-1783) were to be provided to the U.S. Congress by the individual states based on each state's population share in the united colonies. Congressional spending, however, largely flowed to where the theater of war was located....

Congress financed the American Revolution by issuing paper Continental Dollars. The story of the Continental Dollar is familiar to all -- a lot were issued and hyper-inflation ensued. Emissions were permanently discontinued in 1779. Thereafter, they became worthless and were forgotten. They had...

During the New Deal the Roosevelt Administration dramatically expanded relief spending to combat extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. We examine the dynamic relationships between relief spending and local private labor markets using a new panel data set of monthly relief, private...

The U.S. Congress issued paper money called Continental Dollars to finance the American Revolution. The story of the Continental Dollar is familiar to all -- a lot were issued and hyper-inflation ensued. However, the details of this story are less well known. Scholars even disagree over how much...

We examine the importance of Roosevelt's 'relief, recovery, and reform' motives to the distribution of New Deal funds across over 3,000 U.S. counties, program by program. The major relief programs most closely followed Roosevelt's three R's. Other programs were tilted more in favor of areas with...

** Revised version 2005** <p> Using a recently-uncovered data set that describes over 30 federal New Deal spending, loan, and mortgage insurance programs across all U.S. counties from 1933 to 1939, this paper empirically examines the New Deal's impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We...</p>

The spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 are reconstituted using forensic accounting techniques from primary sources. Such has not been done previously for any British North American colony. These data are used to...

The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission...

In this paper, I develop a model to analyze how skill premia differ over time and across countries, and use this model to study the impact of international trade on wage inequality. Skill premia are determined by technology and the relative supply of skills. An increase in the relative supply of...