Berlin Art Week: Conversation between artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas and economist Moritz Schularick. The technological acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution is not only transforming capitalism but also opening up new possibilities for how housing could be organized. Artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas and economist Moritz Schularick consider whether real estate...
The Cotton Boom and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rural Egypt The “staples thesis” argues that institutions in a given region could be explained by the nature of production of its prevailing staples, whereby slavery is likely to emerge in “slave-conducive” crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. This paper evaluates the...
Fiscal problems, Financial Crisis and Credit Markets in Castile under Philip II In the second half of the 16th century, the large nation-wide domestic public debt was created in Castile (exceeded 50% of GDP), as in England or France two centuries later. These impressive numbers were achieved without the efficient...
Unsurprising Shocks: Measuring Responses to Monetary Announcements using High-Frequency Data This paper proposes a new method to construct high-frequency futures-based proxies for the identification of monetary policy shocks in structural VARs. I discuss how the common use of narrow time frames tightly surrounding policy announcements to measure monetary surprises is...
Fiscal and Financial Crises with Michael Bordo. In this paper we examine the interconnections between financial and fiscal crises based on history, theory, and empirics. Section 2 presents a brief historical overview of financial crises. Section 3 surveys theoretical perspectives on financial crises. Banking crises traditionally were analyzed using three...
Global Banking and the International Transmission of the 1931 Financial Crisis How did the 1931 financial crisis propagate internationally? This paper explores the effect of the Central European crisis of the summer of 1931 on US and British banks. Using archival bank-level data, I document US and British banks’ asset...
What Caused Chicago Bank Failures in the Great Depression? A Look at the 1920s This paper reassesses the causes of Chicago bank failures during the Great Depression by tracking the evolution of their balance sheets in the 1920s. I find that all Chicago banks suffered tremendous deposit withdrawals; however banks...
