This essay discusses trends in new banking history scholarship. It does so by conducting bibliometric content analysis of the entire literature involving the history of banks, bankers and banking published in all major academic journals since the year 2000. It places this recent scholarship in...

This paper presents a new indicator on financial stress from 1889 to 2016 based on the reporting in five major US newspapers. This indicator provides detailed and high-frequency coverage of more than a century of financial history based on a previously untapped corpus of 35 million newspaper...

The corporate governance breakdowns of the first decade of the 21st century, including the misaligned incentives that helped to cause the crisis of 2008, suggest an urgent need for reforms beyond those mandated by Dodd-Frank. This book offers reform recommendations based on the relatively...

For most of the twentieth century the conventional wisdom held — probably correctly — that shareholders in America's large corporations were passive and powerless and that real power in a public corporation was wielded by its managers. Beginning in the 1980s, however, shareholders in the...

Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualization of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future of the...

This is an unpublished comment on a Perkin's paper that surveyed banking in colonial America. It argues that historians have overlooked a number of abortive banking schemes in the colonies, implying that the absence of banks was not an "entrepreneurial failure." and that the extension of the...

We study the effects of the first-ever ratings for corporate securities. In 1909, John Moody published a book that partitioned the majority of listed railroad bonds into letter-graded ratings based on his assessments of their credit risk. These ratings had no regulatory implications and were...

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has attracted more attention than it perhaps deserves given that its main empirical claim, that wealth inequality is bound to occur in "capitalist" economies because the rate of return r is greater than the rate of economic growth g (r g), is not rigorously...

We use the unique circumstances that led to the Panic of 1907 to analyze its consequences for non-financial corporations. The onset of the panic occurred following a series of scandalous revelations about the investments of prominent financiers, which triggered widespread runs on trust companies...