Works in Progress
U.S. Insurance Capital, 1880 - 1950
This project’s objective is to understand the evolution and economic role of life and property insurance companies in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries by creating a new, comprehensive firm-level panel database. To the best of my knowledge, disaggregated information about the insurance industry before 1980 is sparse despite the economic importance of these financial intermediaries in public and private debt markets. I digitize publicly available historical documents from regulatory filings and industry publications between 1880 and 1950 and collect income statements, balance sheets, security-level holdings, and state-level mortgage and real estate investments from all insurance companies conducting business in the state of New York (95% of aggregate).
Working Papers
I examine the effects of public debt on municipal services and real outcomes during financial crises using a unique archival dataset of U.S. cities from 1924 to 1943. Unlike today’s countercyclical fiscal policies, the Great Depression provides a rare setting to observe fiscal shocks without substantial intergovernmental or Federal Reserve support. My findings show that financial market frictions—especially the need to refinance debt—led cities to sharply cut expenditures, particularly on capital projects and police services. As urban development halted during the Depression, cities with high pre-crisis debt levels faced significant austerity pressures, a decline in population growth, a rise in crime, and a departure of skilled public servants from municipal governments.
Between 1910 and 1940, the high school graduation rate in the United States increased five-fold, setting the stage for human capital-led economic growth throughout the 20th century. This study examines the effects of the Great Depression’s surge in youth unemployment on educational attainment during the 1930s, with a focus on gender and socioeconomic disparities. Using data from the 1940 Census and novel city-level unemployment rates, the analysis shows that increased youth unemployment significantly boosted high school and post-secondary completion rates among young males, particularly those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. In contrast, the effect on females and lower-income youths was negligible. I find minimal short-term labor market impacts by 1940. The results highlight the critical role of household resources in leveraging educational opportunities during the Great Depression and suggest that financial constraints may have prevented disadvantaged groups from benefiting equally from reduced opportunity costs during a crucial period during the high school movement.
Financial crises often lead to slow economic recovery, possibly due to credit rationing by financial intermediaries. This paper examines the impact of the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s lender of last resort (LLR) policies during the Great Depression, leveraging newly digitized archival data on county-level banking, manufacturing, and industry structure from the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting the quasi-exogenous placement of borders, I evaluate banking and industrial outcomes across counties and plants. The results show that LLR policies significantly reduced bank failures and improved small and medium-sized firm survival rates. However, manufacturing output and employment for surviving firms saw no clear improvement, emphasizing the extensive margin as the primary channel of LLR efficacy.
Mobilizing Savings, Shaping Regions: The Financial Geography of U.S. Life Insurance [Link]
This paper uses newly digitized firm-level data from 1883 to 1940 to examine the role of life insurance companies in reshaping the geography of American finance. I document the rapid expansion and structural transformation of the life insurance industry, as firm formation spread from established financial centers in the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. Despite broader market participation, over 85 percent of premiums continued to flow to out-of-state firms for much of the period, underscoring the persistence of regional asymmetries. I introduce a new measure of inter-state capital transfers based on “excess cash” (premiums minus losses paid) and show that although the total volume of interregional flows increased, the share generated through out-of-state operations declined after 1905 but rose again during the Depression. These findings challenge the view of insurance as a static oligopoly and demonstrate how regulatory differences and political pressure shaped both the distribution of firms and the flow of financial resources across regions.
Publications
[2] Correlation in state and local tax changes [Link]
with Scott Baker and Lorenz Kueng. Journal of Public Economics, 242, 105275. [2025]
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​Empirical research in public economics, including our own, often uses variation in state and local taxes as an empirical laboratory to estimate causal relationships. A key concern is that other taxes might change at the same time. To assess this concern, we develop a dataset of state (1977–2022) and local (2000–2022) tax rates and revenue from personal income, corporate income, property, sales, and excise taxes. This new dataset generates two key results. First, we find that taxes of different types tend to co-move within a jurisdiction: a tax change of one type can more than double the likelihood of a second tax type changing in the same year. Local tax changes also co-move with tax changes enacted by the state they are located in. This positive correlation can upwardly bias elasticity estimates, but only moderately. For example, regressing state economic outcomes on the full set of state tax changes yields elasticities that are about 10%–30% smaller than those obtained from using a single tax type in isolation. Second, we document that the mix of taxes across state and local jurisdictions is very different, and that these differences have become more pronounced over time as jurisdictions have increasingly become reliant on the single tax type — sales, personal or corporate income tax — that was most prominent for them in the earliest part of our sample.
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[2] Financial Crises and Economic Growth: U.S. Cities, Counties, and School Districts during the Great Depression [Link]
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations for the Nevins Prize. Journal of Economic History, 83(2), 582-586. [2023]