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...

Temporary price reductions or “sales†have become increasingly important in the evolution of the price level. We present a model of repeated price competition to illustrate how entry causes incumbents to alternate between high and low prices. Using a six year panel of weekly...

We use a novel data set spanning 1820-1910 to examine the origins of bank supervision and assess factors leading to the creation of formal bank supervision across U.S. states. We show that it took more than a century for the widespread adoption of independent supervisory institutions tasked with...

This paper studies price setting within a chain of grocery stores, using a scanner database that contains observations of retail prices for 435 products within 75 stores over 121 weeks. We find price dispersion within the chain. Stores differentiate themselves by the prices of relatively few...

Bank notes were the largest component of the antebellum money supply despite losses as high as 5 percent in some years. Using a comprehensive bank-level panel of note discounts in New York City and Philadelphia, I explain this contradiction by showing that the secondary market reduced losses by...

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...

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...