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 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...

For Basil Moore and post-Keynesians who have followed him in developing the theory of endogenous money, accommodative central-bank behavior is a logical necessity in credit-money economies. Such central banks have no choice but to accommodate the banking system's demand for liquidity....

Using new quarterly U.S. data for the past 120 years, I show that sudden reversals in equity and credit market sentiment approximated by several measures of corporate securities issuance are highly predictive of banking crises and recessions. Deviations in equity issuance from historical...

The definition of inequality is complicated and difficult to assess, and there are various means by which it is evaluated. This study uses the now well-accepted measures of body mass, height, and weight to assess inequality’s relationship with current and cumulative net nutrition. Taller...

We employ a new data set comprised of disaggregate figures on clearinghouse loan certificate issues in New York City to document how the dominant national banks were crucial providers of temporary liquidity during the Panic of 1907. Clearinghouse loan certificates were essentially bridge loans...

Paper money, when discretionally issued by a government, can be a very powerful political and economic tool. Who invented it and who caused its global diffusion? Scholars are quick to claim the precedence of their home countries without justifying their claims or contesting competing claims. I...

We argue that the system of seigneurial tenure used in the province of Quebec until the mid-nineteenth centurya system which allowed significant market power in the establishment of plants, factories and mills, combined with restrictions on the mobility of the labor force within each seigneurial...

I study the link between real activity and deflation, taking into account measurement problems in 19th century CPI data. Replications based on modern data show that measurement problems spuriously increase the volatility of inflation as well as the number of deflationary episodes, and they lower...

In this paper, we consider whether or not inequality forces society to expend more resources on supervision which imposes an extra cost to doing business. Some argue that since inequality deteriorates social capital, there is a greater need for supervisory labor which is a costly burden to bear....