What can macroeconomic history offer macroeconomic theorists and macroeconometricians? Macroeconomic history offers more than longer time series or special `controlled experiments.' It suggests an historical definition of the economy, which has implications for macroeconometric methods. The...

Most major American industrial business cycles from around 1880 to the First World War were caused by fluctuations in the size of the cotton harvest due to economically exogenous factors such as weather. Wheat and corn harvests did not affect industrial production; nor did the cotton harvest...

Though almost no postwar union contracts indexed wage rates to prices of the employer's products, union agreements linking wage rates to product prices, known as sliding scales, were common in some industries in the United States and Britain from the 1860s through the 1930s. This paper explains...

Primary Sector Shocks and Early American Industrialization Recent advances in the measurement of US manufacturing activity over the long nineteenth century have opened up new possibilities for exploring the dynamics of American economic growth. Building on the pioneering work of J. Davis (2003)...

Most current literature assumes that a central bank loses the ability to influence interest rates through variations in reserve supply as soon as overnight rates have been driven to zero. I argue that reserve supply can be directly related to longer-term rates when overnight rates are zero...

Most major American industrial business cycles from around 1880 to the First World War were caused by fluctuations in the size of the cotton harvest due to economically exogenous factors such as weather. Wheat and corn harvests did not affect industrial production; nor did the cotton harvest...