Hoyt Bleakley and Paul Rhode use a “regression discontinuity design” (RDD) to find a persistent negative effect of slavery’s legality on rural population density throughout the period from 1790 to 1860. Yet their reported results cannot be replicated. Instead, the replication shows...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...

Can economic theory help explain the persistence of a cultural enclave among the Cherokee Indians living in North Carolina during the nineteenth century? To date, Fogelson and Kutsche (1961) and Finger (1984) identify the continuation of a communal, labor-sharing agricultural institution called...

This paper estimates the impact of railroads in the United States between 1850 and 1910 on economic development, fertility, and human capital. A novel identification strategy, which relies on a dynamic instrument, allows me to control for unobservables using county fixed effects. I find that...

At least since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, the problem of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) has received widespread attention. The research conducted in this context has, however, generally focused on the econometric aspect and the contribution of the TBTF doctrine to the financial crisis of...

This paper presents interesting correlations which exist between a model of long-wave economic activity and crisis in the United States – “the Political Economy wave” – and the structure of the rings of Saturn, one of the most confounding structures known to science. At the present time...

In the physical world the “identity” of something is taken generally as a given; an apple is an apple; this apple is this apple. When dealing with planetary structure and extension into space, however, the problem of the planet’s “identity” in the surrounding cosmos is writ large. What...

Το παρόν άρθρο πραγματοποιεί μια ιστορική αναδρομή αναφορικά με τις μεταβολές της νομισματικής πολιτικής στις ΗΠΑ μέσα από τις επιτυχημένες ή μη πολιτικές της...

In Part One of this paper we use the harmonic analogy of a musical octave to analyze mathematic ratios of U.S. real GNP. These ratios are generated by bringing together figures for U.S. real GNP over intervals of time – “spreads of years” – as numerator and denominator in a single...

This book is about the construction of reality. The central aim of this study is to understand how gravity works and how it may be focused and manipulated. While I do not have an answer to this question, the discoveries along the way have been worth collecting into a single volume for future...