Many postbellum southern farms specialized in cotton, but black-operated farms planted much larger shares of cotton than white-operated farms. This paper tests various explanations for the pattern of specialization using 1879 farm-specific data. We find that the cross-sectional racial variation...

Financial economists have long believed that the liquidity of shares affects the level of participation in equity markets and is thus central to their deepening. This study examines the growth in industrial share liquidity that occurred in Boston over the latter half of the 19th century. From...

We examine econometrically the real effects of paper money's introduction into colonial New England over the 1703–1749 period. Departing from earlier analyses that focus primarily on the depreciation of paper money in the region, we show that expansion of the money stock promoted growth in...