This paper examines home bias in U. S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007. We use a unique dataset of 1949 carload waybill statistics produced by the Interstate Commerce Commission and 2007 Commodity Flow Survey data. The results show that home bias was considerably smaller in 1949 than in 2007 and...

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known case of slow diffusion-and show that the...

There were substantial fluctuations in the number of American overseas travelers, especially before World War Two. These fluctuations in travel around the long-term upward trend are the focus of this paper. We first identify those fluctuations in the data and then try to explain the patterns. We...

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

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...

Organized African American baseball (AAB), the longest lived rival to Major League Baseball (MLB) in history, thrived from the 1920s through the early 1940s. Although integration in 1947 focused attention on MLB and the American experience, the impact on AAB receives only passing, somewhat...

This paper uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine whether or not Blue Cross and Blue Shield suffered from an adverse selection death spiral after for-profit commercial insurance companies entered the market for health insurance. Results suggest that moving to experience rating may have...

In the two years after the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930, the volume of U.S. imports fell over 40 percent. To what extent can this collapse of trade be attributed to the tariff itself versus other factors such as declining income or foreign retaliation? Partial and general...

This paper calculates the Anderson-Neary (2005) trade restrictiveness index (TRI) for the United States using nearly a century of data. The results show that the standard import-weighted average tariff understates the TRI, defined as the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as the...

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to...