Among the thirteen original colonies, Pennsylvania was most successful at issuing paper money with only minimal effects on prices --so much so that the colony's experience is sometimes seen as violating the classical quantity theory of money. Quantity theorists usually attribute this apparent anomaly to mismeasurement of the money stock. In contrast, I use data on money, prices, and real activity in Pennsylvania from 1723 to 1774 and for the United States as a whole from 1790 to 1850 (when the money stock is better measured) to show that the long-run behavior of money and prices is well explained by the quantity theory in both periods, despite the differences in institutional arrangements, once growth in monetized transactions is taken into account.

We trace directors through time and across firms to study whether acquirers’ access to nonpublic information about potential targets via their directors’ past board service histories affects the market for corporate control. In a sample of publicly traded U.S. firms, we find acquirers about 4.5 times more likely to buy firms where their directors once served. Effects are stronger when the acquirer has better corporate governance, the interlocked director has a larger ownership stake at the acquirer, or the director played an important role during past service. The findings are robust to endogeneity of board composition and controls for contemporaneous interfirm interlocks.

We assess systemic risk in the U.S. banking system before and after the Panic of 1873, using a combination of linear programming and computational optimization to estimate the interbank network. We impose liquidity shocks resembling those of 1873, and find the network captures the distribution of interbank deposits a year later. The network predicts banks likely to panic in the crisis, and those banks see their balance sheets weaken in the year after the crisis more than others. The results shed light on the nature and regional pattern of withdrawals in a classic 19th-century U.S. financial crisis.

Individual deposits in the United States grew from 5% to 23% of GDP between 1863 and 1913. A comprehensive database shows bank entry underlying this trend while historical events, including the National Banking Acts, resumption in 1879, and the election of 1896, influenced deposits at the bank-level. The nation's embrace of deposits was thus driven by stability of the monetary system and confidence in the safety and utility of established and well-capitalized banks. Bank-level and county-level regressions confirm these patterns for national banks over the entire postbellum period and for a sample of Midwest state and national banks from 1888.

We model merger waves as reallocation waves, and argue that mergers spread new technology in a way that is similar to that of the entry and exit of firms. We focus on two periods: 1890–1930, during which electricity and the internal combustion engine spread through the U.S. economy, and 1970–2000—the Information Age. As the model implies, reallocation did rise during both epochs. The model also implies that exits should lead mergers during a transition, but this seems to have happened more emphatically in the electrification epoch.

The Q-theory of investment says that a firm's investment rate should rise with its Q. We argue here that this theory also explains why some firms buy other firms. We find that 1. A firm's merger and acquisition (M&A) investment responds to its Q more -- by a factor of 2.6 -- than its direct investment does, probably because M&A investment is a high fixed cost and a low marginal adjustment cost activity, 2. The typical firm wastes some cash on M&As, but not on internal investment, i.e., the 'Free-Cash Flow' story works, but explains a small fraction of mergers only, and 3. The merger waves of 1900 and the 1920's, `80s, and `90s were a response to profitable reallocation opportunities, but the `60s wave was probably caused by something else.