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...

Carbon intensity from fossil fuel use in the United States economy peaked in 1917. World War I ended, and the Spanish Flu pandemic broke out one year later in 1918. This paper contends that these events, coupled with associated turmoil in the domestic coal industry, were largely responsible for...

We use the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to study the effect of bankers on corporate boards in facilitating access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations; this was especially true for railroads, which...

The U.S. Constitution removed real and monetary trade barriers between the states. By contrast, these states when they were British colonies exercised considerable real and monetary autonomy over their borders. Purchasing power parity is used to measure how much economic integration between the...

Exchange rates and price indices are constructed to test purchasing power parity between eight British North American colonial locations, five of whom issued their own fiat paper money. Purchasing power parity is then tested between these same locations after six became states politically and...

Four years after the French Revolution, in 1793 a series of wars among France and other major powers of Europe began and they lasted until 1815. There is disagreement among economic historians about the effects of these wars on the trend of US economic growth. This paper aims to answer the...

18th-century British merchants Benjamin Lester and John Slade were attracted to the Notre Dame Bay borderland region of northeastern Newfoundland by the abundance and variety of marketable commodities gracing the region. Their commercial rivalry played out within the context of a wider...

Using newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840-1852, the paper studies the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connections to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation...