Bank Chartering and Political Corruption in Antebellum New York: Free Banking as Reform

One traditional and oft-repeated explanation of the political impetus behind free banking connects the rise of Jacksonian populism and a rejection of the privileges associated with corporate chartering. A second views free banking as an ill-informed inflationist, pro business response to the financial panic of 1837. This chapter argues that both explanations are lacking. Free banking was the progeny of the corruption associated with bank chartering and reflected social, political and economic backlashes against corruption dating to the late-1810s. Three strands of political thought -- Antimasonic egalitarianism, Jacksonian pragmatism, and pro-business American Whiggism -- converged in the 1830s and led to economic reform. Equality of treatment was the political watchword of the 1830s and free banking was but one manifestation of this broader impulse.

Single Parenthood and Childhood Outcomes in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban South

Families are the core social institution and a growing body of research documents the costs of single parenthood for children in the twentieth century. This study documents racial differences in the incidence and costs of single parenthood in the mid-nineteenth century. Data from the urban South reveal two notable consequences of single parenthood. First, white children residing with single mothers left school earlier than children residing with two parents. Black children in single mother homes started school later and left school earlier. Single motherhood is therefore associated with less lifetime schooling for both races, but the consequences of living in a nontraditional home was larger for blacks. Second, single motherhood was associated with an increased incidence of labor force participation for white youth, but not for blacks. Single parenthood imposed costs, in terms of foregone human capital formation, on children in the mid-nineteenth century, but the consequences of single motherhood were mitigated by social norms toward childhood education.

Voting Rights, Share Concentration, and Leverage at Nineteenth-Century US Banks

Studies of corporate governance are concerned with two features of modern shareholding: diffuse ownership and the resulting separation of ownership and control, which potentially leads to managerial self-dealing; and, majority shareholding, which potentially mitigates some managerial self-dealing but opens the door for the expropriation of minority shareholders. This paper provides a study of the second issue for nineteenth-century US corporations. It investigates two related questions. First, did voting rules that limited the control rights of large shareholders encourage diffuse ownership? It did. Second, did diffuse ownership systematically alter bank risk taking? It did. Banks with less concentrated ownership followed policies that reduced liquidity and bankruptcy risk.

Partnership and Hold-Up in Early America

Williamson (1985) argues that individuals form firms with specific internal governance structures to mitigate certain types of opportunistic behavior that may inhibit efficient contracting between independent contractors. But once firms are established, the individuals that comprise them may still act opportunistically. This paper investigates a specific historical case: the partnership in early America. Partnerships grappled with information-based problems, such as adverse selection, moral hazard, as well as ex ante and ex post contractual opportunism, including hold-up. Asset specificity and imperfect contracts made partnerships vulnerable to hold-up, especially when one partner invested in a sunk asset that enhanced the productivity of all other partners. This was a particular problem facing existing partners when they invited a new partner into their firm. Empirical evidence from the mid-nineteenth century suggests that individuals mitigated the effects of pre- and post-contractual opportunism by forming partnerships with others of similar age, productivity, and capital. This finding brings the traditional interpretation of partnerships as mentor-prot‚g‚ relationships into question.

The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is potentially endogenous because racial and ethnic identities are fluid. We look at the free African-American population in the mid-nineteenth century to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting alternative racial identities. We model the choice as an extensive-form game, where whites choose to accept or reject a separate mulatto identity and mixed race individuals then choose whether or not to adopt that mulatto identity. Adopting a mulatto identity generates pecuniary gains, but imposes psychic costs. Our empirical results imply that race is contextual and that there was a large pecuniary benefit to adopting a mixed-race identity.

Colorism and African American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South

Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate the relationships between wealth and the recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps into treatment and characteristic effects. In addition to higher wealth holdings of white households as compared to free African-Americans in general, there are distinct differences between both the characteristics of and wealth of free mulatto and black households, whether male- or female-headed. While black-headed households' mean predicted log wealth was only 20% of white-headed households', mulatto-headed households' was nearly 50% that of whites'. The difference between light- and dark-complexion is highly significant in semi-log wealth regressions. In the decomposition of this wealth differential, treatment effects play a large role in explaining the wealth gap between all subpopulation pairs.

Splendid Associations of Favored Individuals: Federal and State Commercial Banking Policy in the Federalist Era

Early American firms were shaped by contemporary social conceptions of appropriate horizontal power relations inside the firm and the Federalist era bank was shaped by these conceptions. The Federalist era debate on the corporation was much broader than how shareholders would treat with one another. Contemporary Americans who had no direct stake in the business corporation took great interest in its internal governance because rules for how the elite shared power within the corporation spoke to their attitudes toward sharing power in the wider civic polity. Was governance to be plutocratic or democratic? It was within this debate that the first banks were established. This debate influenced how banks were governed, which ultimately influenced how banks did their business. The political debates surrounding the establishment of the Bank of North America (1782) and the Bank of the United States (1791) defined these banks and nearly every bank chartered thereafter up to the mid-1830s and beyond. Specifically, the liberal Bank of North American charter that imposed few meaningful restrictions on the bank’s operation, accountability or governance gave way to the Bank of the United States’s more restrictive charter that sharply limited its operations, made it accountable to government, and defined many of its internal governance procedures. Subsequent state charters were more closely modeled on the Bank of the United States model than the Bank of North America charter.