This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market to diversify away local liquidity shortfalls, allowing it...

In line with Keynes' intuition, volatility in the stock market and in real economic activity are linked by expectations of long term profits. We show that analysts' optimism about the long term earnings growth of S&P 500 firms is associated with a near term boom in major US financial markets,...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

The lack of universal deposit insurance coverage can create liquidity risk during financial crises. This aspect of deposit insurance is hard to test in modern data because of the broad coverage of most systems. We, therefore, study the role that the U.S. Postal Savings System played in...

We study the role of war bonds and inflation in the presidential elections of the 1950s. During World War II, the federal government conducted aggressive campaigns to convince Americans to invest their savings in wartime savings bonds. Although the bonds were nonnegotiable and protected from...

A nationwide banking panic forced President Franklin Roosevelt to declare a nationwide banking holiday immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. The government reopened sound banks sequentially, with some resuming operations sooner and others later. Within three weeks, 11,000 of the...

Building and Loan Associations (B&Ls) financed over half of new houses constructed in the U.S. during the 1920s but they lost their predominance within the following decades as they were pushed to convert into Savings and Loans (S&Ls). This study examines whether the U.S. government-insured...

The massive rise in U.S. stockholding during the early twentieth century resulted in the deepening of securities markets, the spread of investment banks, and the expansion of publicly held corporations. This paper makes use of a unique panel database of South Dakota bank stockholders from...