For more than a decade now [i.e., ca. 1983], historians of technology in the United States have been engaged in a collective historiographic endeavor to generate a "conceptual framework" or set of "organizing themes" that would finally give some coherence to the history of technology as an...

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has attracted more attention than it perhaps deserves given that its main empirical claim, that wealth inequality is bound to occur in "capitalist" economies because the rate of return r is greater than the rate of economic growth g (r g), is not rigorously...

This paper evaluates the link between the diffusion of electricity and the increase in labour productivity growth in the manufacturing sector during the inter-war period. A comparative analysis of the USA, Britain, Germany, and Japan shows that the trend acceleration in labour productivity is...

This paper recounts American economic history for 60 years after World War II. The unusual part of this paper is that it focuses on not only the conventional tale, but also recounts what whites did to and for Blacks over this period. It starts from the unhappy experience of a Black American...

Since its inception, supporters of the Jones Act have claimed that the law is essential to U.S. national security. Although indefensible on economic grounds, Jones Act advocates argue that its restrictions promote the development of both a U.S. merchant marine and shipbuilding and repair...

Over the past fourteen years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has rescued overleveraged financial companies, purchased trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, and created novel facilities to support ordinary businesses, nonprofits, and local governments. While some argue that the Fed has...

The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios...

We explore the long run impact of the Spanish missions on Native American outcomes in the early 20th century. Native communities who interacted with Spanish missionaries developed into enclaves which blended Catholicism with native culture. Some survived assaults on their property rights by...

The rise of the "New History of Capitalism" as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the New History of Capitalism and explain how the different...

This article argues that bank supervision sits at the center of two foundational tensions in the governance of American finance. The first is the extent to which the financial system is controlled by public actors (i.e., the government) or private actors (i.e., the banks). The second is the...