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 I digitize publicly available historical documents from regulatory filings and industry publications between 1880 and 1950 and collect income statements, balance sheets, security-level holdings, and state-level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
This paper provides new causal evidence that lender-of-last-resort (LLR) policies can reshape the long-run geography of economic activity and labor market trajectories. I exploit a natural experiment from the Great Depression: counties in the Atlanta Federal Reserve district were exposed to aggressive liquidity support following the 1930–31 banking crisis, while neighboring counties just outside the district were not. Counties within the district experienced significantly fewer bank failures during 1930–31 and exhibited substantially stronger manufacturing outcomes in subsequent years, offsetting roughly half of the national decline in output, employment, and establishment counts between 1929 and 1931. Using newly digitized county-level manufacturing data and linked 1930–1940 Census microdata, I find that residents of LLR counties were more likely to remain in or enter manufacturing employment by 1940, and were significantly less likely to migrate out of state. These effects are concentrated among younger and less-educated individuals. The results suggest that early financial stabilization shaped the long-run spatial distribution and composition of manufacturing employment.
Mobilizing Savings, Shaping Regions: The Financial Geography of U.S. Life Insurance [Link]
This paper uses newly digitized annual firm-level data from 1880 to 1940 to study how life insurance companies reshaped the geography of American finance before the advent of Social Security. I document rapid growth in the scale and geographic reach of the industry, as firm entry expanded beyond traditional financial centers into the Midwest and South. Despite this dispersion, premium collection remained highly concentrated: for most states, over 85 percent of premiums continued to flow to insurers headquartered elsewhere, and major financial centers, especially New York, retained a disproportionate share of excess cash. I show that large insurers expanded primarily along the intensive margin, benefiting from spatial risk pooling and stable loss experience, while smaller entrants operated at limited scale. On the demand side, declining relative prices increased household insurance use, and during the Great Depression households relied on existing contracts for liquidity. I quantify regional spatial dynamics and introduce a new measure of interstate capital transfers based on net cash flows. While total inter-regional transfers increased substantially over time, local retention rose during the Progressive Era before reversing during the Depression. Together, the results challenge the view of life insurance as a static oligopoly and instead portray it as a dynamic intermediary whose expansion, regulation, and capital flows shaped regional finance in the first half of the twentieth-century United States.
Publications
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.
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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.
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[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.
[1] 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]