Hugh Rockoff
Research Associate
Rutgers University
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Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
When the Great Depression struck the United States, Oliver M.W. Sprague was Americas foremost expert on financial crises. His History of Crises under the National Banking System is a frequently cited classic. Had he diagnosed a banking panic and called for an aggressive response by the Federal...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This is my presidential address to the Economic History Association that was delivered in September 2020. It examines the failures or in some cases near-failures, of financial institutions that started the 12 most severe peacetime financial panics in the United States, beginning with the Panic of...
December 28, 2020 - Article
Between 1890 and 1899, African American jockeys won the Kentucky Derby six times. By the early 1900s, they were history. I n...
Between the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century there were many prominent African American jockeys. They rode winners in all of the Triple-Crown races. But at the turn of the century they were forced out. This paper uses a new data set on the Triple-Crown races, which includes odds on...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The creation of the National Bureau of Economic Research was a response to the bitter controversies over the distribution of income that roiled the United States during the Progressive Era. Thanks to Malcolm Rorty, a business economist, and Nahum I. Stone, an independent socialist economist, a...
The Kentucky Derby is the premier American horse race. The first race was held in 1875 and 13 of the 15 jockeys were African Americans. African American jockeys continued to play an important role until the turn of the 19th century when they were forced from the Kentucky Derby and the other big...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
Although attempts to measure trends in prices, output, and employment can be traced back for centuries, in the main the origins of the U.S. federal statistics are to be found in bitter debates over economic policy, ultimately debates over the distribution of income, at the end of the nineteenth...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
During World War II the United States rapidly transformed its economy to cope with a wide range of scarcities, such as shortfalls in the amounts of ocean shipping, aluminum, rubber, and other raw materials needed for the war effort. This paper explores the mobilization to see whether it provides...
We present a new monthly index of the yield on junk (high yield) bonds from 1910-1955. We then use the index to reexamine some of the main debates about the financial history of the interwar years. A close look at junk bond yields: (1) strengthens the view that the decline in lending standards in...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The institutional arrangements governing the creation of money in the United States have changed dramatically since the Revolution. Yet beneath the surface the story of wartime money creation has remained much the same. During wars against minor powers, the government was able to fund the war by...
In this paper we trace the evolution of the lender of last resort doctrineand its implementationfrom the nineteenth century through the panic of 2008. We find that typically the most influential economists fight the last war: formulating policy guidelines that would have dealt effectively with the...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
O.M.W. Sprague was America's leading expert on financial crises when America was debating establishing the Federal Reserve. His History of Crises under the National Banking Act is one of the most enduring legacies of the National Monetary Commission; a still frequently cited classic. Since the...
A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide...
December 1, 2011 - Article
In Canada the banking system was... a system of large financial institutions whose size and diversification enhanced their robustness. When European and North American banks teetered on the brink of meltdown in 2008, requiring bailouts and extraordinary central bank intervention, Canadian banks...
The financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the banking system of the United States and many large European countries. Canada was a notable exception. In this paper we argue that the structure of financial systems is path dependent. The relative stability of the Canadian banks in the recent crisis...
This paper examines the influence of Irving Fisher's writings on Milton Friedman's work in monetary economics. We focus first on Fisher's influences in monetary theory (the quantity theory of money, the Fisher effect, Gibson's Paradox, the monetary theory of business cycles, and the Phillips Curve,...
May 17, 2011 - Chapter
This paper reexamines the debate over whether the United States fell into a liquidity trap in the 1930s. We first review the literature on the liquidity trap focusing on Keynes's discussion of "absolute liquidity preference" and the division that soon emerged between Keynes, who believed that a...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
Adam Smith advocated laissez faire for most sectors of the economy, but he believed that banking and finance required several forms of regulation including usury laws and the prohibition of small-denomination bank notes. Smith's support for banking regulation appears to have been a response to the...
The relationships among the weather, agricultural markets, and financial markets have long been of interest to economic historians, but relatively little empirical work has been done. We push this literature forward by using modern drought indexes, which are available in detail over a wide area and...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This paper explores the origins of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age. It relies mainly on two lists of millionaires published in 1892 and 1902, similar to the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans. Manufacturing, as might be expected, was the most important source of Gilded Age...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
During World War II Americans were called upon repeatedly to salvage raw materials for the war effort, often during brief, highly publicized "drives." Stories about the salvage drives are a staple in both popular and scholarly histories of the home front, and in film documentaries, because the...
This paper explores new estimates of the number of veterans and the value of veterans' benefits -- both cash benefits and land grants -- from the Revolution to 1900. Benefits, it turns out, varied substantially from war to war. The veterans of the War of 1812, in particular, received a smaller...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This paper explores some of the scholarship that influenced Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's "A Monetary History". It shows that the ideas of several Chicago economists -- Henry Schultz, Henry Simons, Lloyd Mints, and Jacob Viner -- left clear marks. It argues, however, that the most important...
October 1, 2006 - Article
Do economic sanctions levied by one nation against another for political purposes work? In...
During World War II the Allies controlled Spain's oil supply in order to limit Spain's support for the Axis. This experiment with sanctions is unusually informative because a wide range of policies was tried over a long period. Three episodes are of special interest: (1) a total embargo on oil for...
In World War I the Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, hoped to create a broad market for government bonds, the famous Liberty Loans, by following an aggressive policy of "capitalizing patriotism." He called on everyone from Wall Street bankers to the Boy Scouts to volunteer for the...
January 1, 2005 - Article
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The total cost of World War I to the United States (was) approximately $32 billion, or 52 percent of gross national product at the time. Did World War I produce a major economic break from the past in the United States? Did the U.S. economy change in some fundamental and lasting ways as a result of...
The long running debate among economic historians over how long it took regional financial markets in the United States to become fully integrated should be of considerable interest to students of monetary unions. This paper reviews the debate, discusses the implications of various hypotheses for...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The process by which the US economy was mobilized during World War I was the subject of considerable criticism both at the time and since. Nevertheless, when viewed in the aggregate the degree of mobilization achieved during the short period of active US involvement was remarkable. The United States...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
During the Colonial era usury laws in the United States were strict both in terms of the maximum rate that could be charged and the penalties that would be imposed. In Massachusetts in eighteenth century, for example, the maximum rate was 6 percent, and both principal and interest were forfeited if...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This paper argues that the banking crises in the United States in the early 1930s were similar to the twin crises' -- banking and balance of payments crises -- which have occurred in developing countries in recent years. The downturn that began in 1929 undermined banks that had made risky loans in...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This essay provides an historical background for understanding the statistics on veterans that will appear in the millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. It describes changes in the number of veterans, and in the benefits provided by governments to veterans, from...
One of the most sustained uses of economic warfare by the United States occurred in Spain during WWII. We provide an overview of this episode based on the secondary literature and new research in the Spanish archives. We focus on three key battles: (1) an oil embargo against Spain in the summer of...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The United States is often taken to be the exemplar of the benefits of a monetary union. Since 1788 Americans, with the exception of the Civil War years, have been able to buy and sell goods, travel, and invest within a vast area without ever having to be concerned about changes in exchange rates....
January 1, 1998 - Chapter
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
According to most standard accounts of the mobilization of the U.S. economy in World War II, things started out badly because the agency nominally in charge, the War Production Board, lacked sufficient authority and relied on faulty techniques. But then the War Production Board installed the famous...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This paper examines the U.S. economy in World War II. It argues that the mobilization must be viewed as a rapidly evolving historical process rather than, as is often the case a single undifferentiated event. For example, the employment of unemployed resources, a factor often cited to explain the...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
The quality of the money stock declined during the banking crises of the early 1930s. Bank deposits did not serve as a secure short- term store of purchasing power for use in an emergency as well as they had previously, and during the periods of restricted deposits in late 1932 and early 1933, bank...
This paper asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our...
January 1, 1992 - Chapter
January 1, 1992 - Chapter
January 1, 1992 - Chapter
Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel
January 1, 1992 - Book - Conference Volume
Offering new research on strategic factors in the development of the nineteenth century American economylabor, capital, and political structurethe contributors to this volume employ a methodology innovated by Robert W. Fogel, one of the leading pioneers of the "new economic history." Fogels work is...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
This paper brings together data from a variety of sources to create a portrait of net rates of return to capital in banking in the 1850s. The primary purpose is to provide estimates comparable to those developed by Lance Davis and many subsequent researchers for the post-bellum period. The...
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
There has been considerable interest in recent years in historical experiments with "free banking." This paper examines once again the American experiments in the decades before the Civil War, and the recent literature on them. The lessons of this experience for four issues are considered: (1) the...
January 1, 1984 - Chapter
Author(s) - Hugh Rockoff
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