Many criticise the Canadian economy, of its abysmal performance, of how some provinces are being left behind, high national debt and exorbitant tax rates. However, in 1992 Canada ranked as the best country in the world to live, based on GDP per capita, life expectancy, literacy rates and years...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

This paper assesses the validity of comparisons between the current financial crisis and past crises in the United States. We highlight aspects of two National Banking Era crises (the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1907) that are relevant for comparison with the Panic of 2008. In 1873,...

This paper examines the impacts of banking market structure and regulation on economic growth using new data on banking market concentration and manufacturing industry-level growth rates for U.S. states during 1899-1929 — a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and...

Who invents? This is a central question to understanding possible barriers to entry in the innovation process. To address it, we match the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents from 1870 to 1940 to the corresponding U.S. Federal Population Censuses. This matching procedure provides a rich...

Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent failures can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The...

This paper quantifies the economic benefits of joining the United States. Adapting extant static synthetic control models into a dynamic model similar to Arellano and Bond (1991), we are able to construct the counterfactual growth paths of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah,...

As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the nineteenth century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands,...

Economists have long debated the relationship of bank credit to the business cycle. The attribution of economic cycles to the "inherent instability" of fractional-reserve banking has been advanced not only by Austrian scholars in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, but also by a number of...