The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became quot;ruinous,quot; forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue...

Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled in segregated units and received little formal training. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role...

The economic history of the United States is riddled with financial crises and banking panics. During the nineteenth-century, eight major such episodes occurred. In the period following World War II, some believed that these crises would no longer happen, and that the U.S. had reached a time of...

"In 1690, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first government in the Western world to print paper money, the imagery for which initiated an indigenous American art form of remarkable dynamism and originality. After the Revolutionary War, disillusioned by how quickly its promiscuous printing...

On any given night more 744,000 people are homeless in the United States, approximately 98,000 families. More than 40 percent of those who are homeless have served in the armed services and close to 30 percent are children. While the federal government has implemented various policies and...