Good data on US stock market returns before the advent of the Cowles' (1939) dataset in 1871 have been scarce. Small samples and an inability to observe dividends render current estimates suspect. I report total return for a much larger sample of stocks before 1871 than heretofore seen. I...

We study the economics and finance scholars' reaction to the 2008 financial crisis using machine learning language analyses methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and dynamic topic modelling algorithms, to analyze the texts of 14,270 NBER working papers covering the 1999-2016 period. We find...

We document three new facts about nonbank lending in the syndicated loan market. First, lending by nonbanks is about three times as cyclical as lending by banks, even after controlling for borrower demand and loan characteristics. Second, the cyclicality of nonbanks - as opposed to bank health -...