Did financial development and international trade reinforce each other and drive economic growth more than a century ago? We investigate these linkages among 17 countries during the first wave of economic globalization (1850-1929). Cross-country dynamic panels as well as VARs and VECMs for...

One strand of the economics literature addresses financial deepening as a precursor to economic growth. Another views it as a cause of financial crises. We examine historical data for 17 economies from 1870 to 1929 to distinguish episodes of growth induced by financial deepening from crises...

We assess systematic risk in the U.S. banking system before and after the Panic of 1873 using a combination of linear programming and computational optimization to estimate the interbank network based upon total gross and net positions of national banks a week before the crisis. We impose...

The Panic of 1837 stands among the most severe banking crises in U.S. history, marking the start of a business downturn from which the nation would not recover for six years. Given the serious consequences of the panic for the rapidly evolving commercial and industrial sectors, it is thus not...

Electricity and Information Technology (IT) are perhaps the two most important general purpose technologies (GPTs) to date. We analyze how the U.S. economy reacted to them. The Electricity and IT eras are similar, but also differ in several important ways. Electrification was more broadly...

President Jackson vetoed the bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States on 10 July 1832. I describe events leading to the veto and through the Bank’s dissolution in 1836 using private correspondence and official government documents. These sources reveal a political process...

Firms that entered the stock market in the 1990s were younger than any earlier cohort since World War I. Surprisingly, however, firms that IPO'd at the close of the 19th century were just as young as the companies that are entering today. We argue here that the electrification-era and the IT-era...

Throughout much of the twentieth century, economists paid little heed to the role of financial intermediaries in procuring a beneficial allocation of capital. But by the end of the century some financial historians had begun to turn the tide, and the phrase 'finance-growth nexus' became part of...