The goal of this paper is to ascertain whether older women's current and anticipated future labor force patterns have changed over time, and if so, to evaluate the factors associated with longer work lives and plans to continue work at older ages. Using data from both the Health and Retirement...

This paper reexamines the debate over whether the United States fell into a liquidity trap in the 1930s. We first review the literature on the liquidity trap focusing on Keynes's discussion of "absolute liquidity preference" and the division that soon emerged between Keynes, who believed that a...

We examine financial literacy in the United States using the new National Financial Capability Study, wherein we demonstrate that financial literacy is particularly low among the young, women, and the less-educated. Moreover, Hispanics and African-Americans score the least well on financial...

The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide...

The passage of the National Banking Acts stabilized the existing financial system and encouraged the entry of 729 banks between 1863 and 1866. The national banks not only attracted more deposits than previous state banks, but also concentrated in the area that would eventually become the...

The Constitution of 1787 was designed to give Congress powers over trade policy that it lacked under the Articles of Confederation. The Washington administration was split over whether to use these powers to raise revenue or to retaliate against Britain's discriminatory trade policies. Obsessed...

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...

This paper calculates the Anderson-Neary (2005) trade restrictiveness index (TRI) for the United States using nearly a century of data. The results show that the standard import-weighted average tariff understates the TRI, defined as the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as the...

The United States became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid-1890s. This paper argues that natural resource abundance fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price...