Profile Information

Profile

I am an economic historian interested in banking and financial history, the economics of crime, and the economics of race and racial identity. My research in banking history focuses on two issues: (1) the connection between banking and economic development in the nineteenth-century; and (2) how alternative corporate governance institutions influenced bank behavior. My research into the history of crime focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing, and the effects of immigration on crime rates. My research into race focuses on color-based disparities among African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I have received major grants from the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (2006) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2009).
I am a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Development of the American Economy group.

Research Interests

• Banking and financial history, the economic history of crime, the economics of race.

Research Publications

• “The extent of the market for early American bank notes.” Journal of Economic History 86:3 (September 2026), 657-685.
• Bad men, good roads, Jim Crow, and the economics of southern chain gangs. Essays in Economic & Business History 41.2 (November 2023), 149-170.
• “Were small-town New Yorkers life-cycle savers?” The History of the Family 27.2, (2022), 293-325.
• https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2022.2038654
• “Later-life realizations of Maryland’s nineteenth-century pauper apprentices.” In Standard of Living: Essays on Economics, History, and Religion in Honor of John E. Murray, pp. 211-243. Edited by Patrick Gray, Joshua Hall, Ruth Herndon, and Javier Silvestre. Springer (2022).
• “Political distribution of economic privilege in Van Buren’s New York.” Studies in American Political Development 35:1 (April 2021), 127-145.
• “Private Seeking of Private Monopoly in Early American Banking.” In Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History, Vol. 3. Edited by Joshua Hall and Marcus Witcher. Springer (2019), 167-206.
• “Were nineteenth-century industrial workers permanent income savers?” Southern Economic Journal 85:4 (April 2019), 1286-1310.
• “Diagnosing sample-selection bias in historical heights: a reply to Komlos and A’Hearn.” Journal of Economic History 79:4 (2019), 1154-1175.
• “A Theory of and Diagnostics for Selection Biases in Historical Heights Samples.” Research in Economic History 35 (2019), 59-89.
• “Finance and Urbanization in Early Nineteenth-Century New York.” Journal of Urban Economics 104 (March 2018), 47-58.
• “The Forgotten Half of Finance: Working-Class Saving in Late Nineteenth-Century New Jersey.” Research in Economic History 34 (2018), 35-66.

Links

• National Bureau of Economic Research
• Economic History Services