We show that decentralized privately created money with unstable values can hinder the traded, more transaction-friction sensitive, sector of the economy. We do so in the context of the NationalBanking Act of 1864 in the United States that created a new federally-regulated, fully-backed currency...

We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations. When asset markets are illiquid, as modeled via endogenous...

This paper surveys the recent empirical literature on historical banking crises, defined as events taking place before 1980. Advances in data collection and identification have provided new insights into the causes and consequences of crises both immediately and over the long run. We highlight...

Using a new dataset on sectoral credit exposures covering financial and non-financial sectors in 115 economies over the period 1940-2014, we document the following evidence that corporate debt plays a key role in explaining boom-bust cycles, financial crises, and slow macroeconomic recoveries:...

The County Business Pattern ("CBP") files contain employment and establishment counts for detailed industry codes covering all counties in the United States. The contribution of this project is to digitize, clean, and prepare the CBP files from 1946-1974. We also apply the methods developed in...

We study the relationship between credit expansions, macroeconomic fluctuations, and financial crises using a novel database on the sectoral distribution of private credit for 117 countries since 1940. We document that, during credit booms, credit flows disproportionately to the non-tradable...

We study how financial development affects economic development and wage inequality. We use a large expansion of government-owned banks into Brazilian cities with low bank branch coverage and combine it with data on the universe of employees from 2000-2014. We find that higher financial...

As financial technology improves and data becomes more abundant, do market prices reflect this data growth? While recent studies documented rises in the information content of prices, we show that, across asset types, there is data divergence. Large, growth stock prices increasingly reflect...

We show that foreign capital liberalization reduces capital misallocation and increases aggregate productivity in India. The staggered liberalization of access to foreign capital across disaggregated industries allows us to identify changes in firms' input wedges, overcoming major challenges in...

This paper investigates the 2013 three-fold increase in the French dividend tax rate. Using administrative data covering the universe of firms from 2008-2017 and a quasi-experimental setting, we find that firms swiftly cut dividend payments and used this tax-induced increase in liquidity to...