Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? What channels could it work through? What are the long run consequences? In this paper we address these questions by examining the farm land price boom (and bust) in the United States that preceded the Great Depression. We find that...

Landed elites in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century played a significant role in restricting the development of finance. States that had higher land concentration passed more restrictive banking legislation. At the county level, counties with very concentrated land...

Economists have argued that a high concentration of land holdings in a country can create powerful interest groups that retard the creation of economic institutions, and thus hold back economic development. Could these arguments apply beyond underdeveloped countries with backward political...