Do non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing mortality during a pandemic necessarily have adverse economic effects? We use variation in the timing and intensity of NPIs across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic to examine their economic impact. While the pandemic itself was...

How does banking competition affect credit provision and growth? How does it affect financial stability? In order to identify the causal effects of banking competition, we exploit a discontinuity in bank capital requirements during the 19th century National Banking Era. We show that banks...

This paper discusses how to successfully digitize large-scale historical micro-data by augmenting optical character recognition (OCR) engines with pre- and post-processing methods. Although OCR software has improved dramatically in recent years due to improvements in machine learning,...

The recent rise in price pressures around the world has reignited interest in understanding how inflation transmits to the real economy. Economists have long recognized that unexpected surges of inflation can redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors when debt contracts are written in...

Carlson et al. (2022) examine the causal impact of banking competition by investigating a unique circumstance in the National Banking Era of the nineteenth century in the US, where a discontinuity in bank capital requirements occurred. On the one hand, their findings suggest that banks operating...

Carlson et al. (2022) examine the causal impact of banking competition by investigating a unique circumstance in the National Banking Era of the nineteenth century in the US, where a discontinuity in bank capital requirements occurred. On the one hand, their findings suggest that banks operating...

Carlson et al. (2022) examine the causal impact of banking competition by investigating a unique circumstance in the National Banking Era of the nineteenth century in the US, where a discontinuity in bank capital requirements occurred. On the one hand, their findings suggest that banks operating...

Unexpected inflation can redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors. In the presence of financing frictions, such redistribution can impact the allocation of real activity. We use the German inflation of 1919-1923 to study how a large inflationary shock is transmitted to the real economy via...