Is political unity a necessary condition for a successful monetary union? The early United States seems a leading example of this principle. But the view is misleadingly simple. I review the historical record and uncover signs that the United States did not achieve a stable monetary union, at...

A large body of evidence links financial development to economic growth, yet the channels through which inflation affects this relationship and its stability have been less thoroughly explored. We take an econometric and graphical approach to analyzing these channels, and find that higher levels...

Data on U.S. mergers and aquisitions from 1987 to 2006 indicate that firms with high market-to-book values (i.e., Tobin's Q) tend to merge with firms that have lower Q's, but that target Q's are on average higher than those of firms not involved in mergers at all. We capture this fact with a...

Although the finance-growth relationship is now firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, we show that it is not as strong in more recent data as it was in the original studies with data for the period from 1960 to 1989. We consider several explanations. First, we find that the incidence of...

The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and...

In this essay I propose that the adoption of the U.S. dollar as a common currency shortly after the ratification of the Federal Constitution and the accompanying transition from a fiat to specie standard was a pivotal moment in the nation's early history and marked an improvement over the...