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...

We study corporate bond default rates using an extensive new data set spanning the 1866–2008 period. We find that the corporate bond market has repeatedly suffered clustered default events much worse than those experienced during the Great Depression. For example, during the railroad crisis of...

Before the formation of the Federal Reserve, banking panics were routine events in the United States. During the most severe episodes, banks in cities across the country would often suspend or restrict the par convertibility of their demand deposit liabilities. In diagnosing the causes of the...

This paper examines the origins and early performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort. The Fed was established to overcome the problems of the National Banking era, in particular an "inelastic" currency and the absence of an effective lender of last resort. As conceived by Paul...

This paper examines the origins and early performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort. The Fed was established to overcome the problems of the National Banking era, in particular an “inelastic” currency and the absence of an effective lender of last resort. As conceived by...

Focusing on a “safe withdrawal rate” and then deriving a “wealth accumulation target” to achieve by the retirement date is the wrong way to think about retirement planning. Such a formulation isolates the working (accumulation) and retirement (decumulation) phases. When considered...

Remittances of Continental Dollars to the national treasury from each state by year from 1779 through 1789 are used to determine state compliance with congressional resolutions regarding Continental-Dollar redemption. From 1781 through 1789, the states as a whole stayed well ahead of the...

Maryland’s non-legal-tender paper money emissions between 1765 and 1775 are reconstructed to determine the quantities outstanding and their redemption dates, providing a substantial correction to the literature. Over 80 percent of this paper money’s current market value was expected real...

Resumen: En los inicios del siglo XX, las dos guerras mundiales constituyeron un importante antecedente económico y político para la definición de la teoría y las políticas macroeconómicas de las dos escuelas fundamentales: El Keynesianismo y la escuela neoclásica. A partir del Tratado de...

The purpose of this paper is to convince the reader that the Continental dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond and not a fiat currency--thereby overturning 230 years of scholarly interpretation; to show that the public and leading Americans knew and acted on this fact, and to illustrate the...