The theory of “financial fragility” emphasizes the role of weak balance sheets in propagating and magnifying macroeconomic shocks. I use a new panel dataset to investigate the relationship between financial fragility and real activity on U.S. railroads during 1929-1940. First, I formulate a...

This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the...

This paper provides a simplified method of exploring the geographical limits of a knowledge shock over the long run. Using a geographically decomposable distanceweighed sum of world GDPs by county, differences in differences regression analysis shows that a new university will not only have a...

Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal's role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen-Roback style model to examine how differences in...

This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyse the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than...

This dissertation was prepared by Jasmin Gröschl and is a collection of five self-contained empirical essays. They aim at contributing to the understanding of non-standard determinants of trade and migration: historical and cultural characteristics in the United States (Chapter 1),...

Electrification among American farm households increased from less than 10 percent to nearly 100 percent over a three decade span, 1930{1960. We exploit the historical rollout of the U.S. power grid to study the short- and long-run impacts of rural electrification on local economies. In the...

Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

Canada played an important role in the postwar establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), yet it was also the first major member to challenge the orthodoxy of the BrettonWoods par value system by abandoning it in 1950 in favour of a floating, market-determined exchange rate....

Canada played an important role in the postwar establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), yet it was also the first major member to challenge the orthodoxy of the BrettonWoods par value system by abandoning it in 1950 in favour of a floating, market-determined exchange rate....