Adam Smith and Milton Friedman are famous for championing Laissez Faire, yet both supported government regulation of the banking system. In both cases their deviation from free market orthodoxy was based on a careful reading of financial history: especially Smith's reading of the Crisis of 1772...

This paper contains all of the statistical results underlying our paper "The Origin and Diffusion of Shocks to Regional Interest Rates in the United States, 1880-2002." It also contains a table of the underlying data, and a discussion of how the data was constructed.

This essay provides an historical background for understanding the statistics on veterans that will appear in the millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. It describes changes in the number of veterans, and in the benefits provided by governments to veterans, from...

During World War II Americans were asked to salvage a long list of materials for the war effort including paper, tin, iron and steel, rubber, and even silk stockings and cooking fat. Stories about the salvage drives have become a staple in both popular and scholarly histories of the home front,...

The United States is often taken to be the exemplar of the benefits of a monetary union. Since 1788 Americans, with the exception of the Civil War years, have been able to buy and sell goods, travel, and invest within a vast area without ever having to be concerned about changes in exchange...

This paper argues that the banking crises in the United States in the early 1930s were similar to the “twin crises” -- banking and balance of payments crises -- which have occurred in developing countries in recent years. The downturn that began in 1929 undermined banks that had made risky...

According to the standard accounts of the mobilization of resources in the United States during WWII, things went badly in the beginning because the agencies in charge were given insufficient authority and were mismanaged. But then in 1943 the story continues, the War Production Board installed...

In this paper we argue that adherence to the gold standard rule of convertibility of national currencies into a fixed weight of gold served as `a good housekeeping seal of approval' which facilitated access by peripheral countries to foreign capital from the core countries of western Europe. We...

This paper examines the U.S. Economy in World War II. It argues that the mobilization must be viewed as a rapidly evolving historical process rather than, as is often the case, a single differentiated event. For example, the employment of unemployed resources, a factor often cited to explain the...

It is frequently claimed that World War II contributed to the growth of big government in the United States. One theory is that agencies that were given additional resources or authority during the war were able to retain them after the war because the agencies and their supporters were able to...