Recent research has documented a rise in income and wealth inequality to levels not observed since the Gilded Age. This paper argues that focusing on income inequality trends masks gains in relative welfare over time. For a given a distribution of income, welfare differences among different...

The history of the financing of the American corporation can be described along many dimensions. One dimension of that history that underlies various measures of historical change in corporate finance is the range of feasible relationships between corporations and intermediaries. Intermediaries...

We measure the effect of bank failures on economic growth using data from 1900 to 1930, a period without active government stabilization policies and several severe banking crises. VAR model estimates suggest bank failures have long-lasting negative effects on economic growth. A bank failure...

Using a newly discovered dataset of U.S. bank suspensions from 1921 to 1929, we discovered that banking panics were more common in the 1920s than had been believed. Besides identifying panics, we investigate their determinants, finding that local banking panics were more likely when fundamental...

This paper compares corruption in China over the past 15years with corruption in the US between 1870 and 1930, periods that are roughly comparable in terms of real income per capita. Corruption indicators for both countries and both periods are constructed by tracking corruption news in...

This paper uses a large longitudinal database (nearly 6,000 observations) of all cabernet sauvignon wines rated by <italic>Wine Spectator</italic> from 1970 to 2004 in the Napa Valley region of California to investigate whether a quality-weather relationship and a price-weather relationship exist and, if so,...

This paper evaluates whether tasting notes—the brief testimony that describes the sensory properties of wines—add value. The analysis is based on a sample of over 2700 recent-vintage cabernet sauvignon wines evaluated by <italic>Wine Spectator</italic>. I estimate a dynamic wine price model to evaluate the...