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

• Howard Bodenhorn. THE COLOR FACTOR: AFRICAN-AMERICAN WELL-BEING IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTH. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• “Diagnosing sample-selection bias in historical heights: a reply to Komlos and A’Hearn.” Journal of Economic History 79:4 (2019), 1154-1175.
• “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.
• “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.
• “Two Centuries of Finance and Growth in the United States, 1790-1980.” In Handbook of Finance and Growth. Edited by Thorsten Beck and Ross Levine. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar (2018), 107-147.
• < with Timothy Guinnane and Thomas Mroz> “Sample-selection Biases and the Industrialization Puzzle.” Journal of Economic History 77.1 (March 2017), 171-207

Links

• National Bureau of Economic Research
• Economic History Services