Editors of the Essays in Economic and Business History are proud to announce the publication of two In Press articles forthcoming in the May 2018 printed volume of the journal. The articles are:
Did construction of the Bureau of Reclamation dams in the early 20th century raise farm values and increase agricultural output? I construct a new county-level panel dataset from 1890 to 1920 with information on geography, climate, politics, agriculture, and major dams, and then evaluate the effect of the Bureau of Reclamation dams on the value of farms and on crop productivity. Using fixed effect panel estimation, I find that new federal dam construction increased the average value of farmland by approximately 6.4 percent. When I apply an instrument to control for potential endogeneity, the effect of Bureau dams on farmland value increases in size, although the estimate also becomes noisier and is no longer statistically significant. My results indicate that Bureau dams constructed in prior decades and the new dams constructed by other agencies did not have a statistically significant effect on the value of farms. In terms of crop output, the only crop affected by the dams was alfalfa.
Rebecca Stuart: The Co-movement of the Irish, UK, and US Stock Markets, 1869–1925
This paper studies the co-movements of the Irish stock markets with those in the UK and the US using monthly data between 1869 and 1925. The time-varying correlation of the markets are estimated in a tri-variate DCC-GARCH framework. Spillovers from the UK market to the Irish market are evident in increasing correlation during periods of crisis. The correlation between the Irish and UK markets is much higher than that between the US and either market, suggesting that there was an unusually strong relationship between the Irish and UK markets during the sample period.