Mortgage amortization schedules are illiquid savings plans comparable in size to pension programs; however, little is known about their effects on wealth accumulation. Using individual administrative data and plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of home purchase (ex. childbirth-driven)...

Do reputational concerns of financial intermediaries dampen credit booms and busts? Does this hold in the context of mortgage-backed securities? During a credit boom revolving around the securitization of West-Indian plantation-mortgages in the 1760s, high-reputation underwriters virtually...

Housing is the main asset through which households accumulate wealth and its taxation is highly debated. We provide the first empirical estimates of the long-run effects of shocks to property taxation on lifetime wealth accumulation and investment. To do so, we examine a unique 18th-century tax...

We study the impact of the introduction of a form of bankruptcy protection on household investment in the U.S. South in the 1840s, which predated modern bankruptcy laws. During this period, certain southern states passed laws that protected married women's property from seizure in the case of...

This paper uses the ability to recall one's age correctly as an indicator of numeracy. We show that low levels of nutrition impaired numeracy in industrializing England, 1780-1850. Numeracy declined markedly among those born during the war years, especially where wheat was dear. England's...