We investigate the relationships of bank failures and balance sheet conditions with measures of proximity to different forms of transportation in the United States over the period from 1830-1860. A series of hazard models and bank-level regressions indicate a systematic relationship between...

Infant industry protection has been the cornerstone of a debate on tariff policy that extends at least from the eighteenth century to the current day. In contrast to traditional neo-classical models of international trade that imply net negative effects, industrial organization and...

This paper examines how the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Exploiting geographic variation in the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I demonstrate a negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is...

Innovation is widely acknowledged as one of the main forces driving economic growth. However, despite our significant knowledge of the technological determinants of innovation processes, an adequate understanding of demand side factors is still lacking. This paper aims to survey the literature...

The politically-charged notion of network neutrality came to the fore in 2005 and 2006, using analogy from transportation as one of the key tools in motivating arguments. This paper examines how the various notions around network neutrality (common carriage, regulation, price discrimination)...

We employ the conjectural approach to estimate the growth of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the mid-Atlantic region (Del., NJ, NY and Penn). In contrast to previous studies of the region's growth that relied heavily on the performance of the export sector, the conjectural method...

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known case of slow diffusion-and show that the...

In the "neutrality years" 1793-1807 and beyond, U.S. merchants drew on Spanish-American silver to finance their carrying trade and to settle deficits with Europe and the Far East. The size and direction of these payments must remain unknown, because no records of silver flows were kept until...

This study analyzes trends and determinants of the height of men born in the 100 largest American urban areas during the second half of the nineteenth century and compares them with heights of the rural population. In this sample of 21,704 US Army recruits, there is an urban height penalty of up...

'We employ the Anderson-Neary Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) to examine Canadian trade policy during the first wave of globalization (1870-1913). Our analysis is the first to examine two important features of this period using the TRI: 1) the shift to protectionist trade policies, and 2) the...