J. Bradford De Long

Princes and Merchants: European City Growth before the Industrial Revolution*

As measured by the pace of city growth in western Europe from 1000 to 1800. absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without absolutist government. This might be explained by higher rates of taxation under revenue-maximizing absolutist governments than under non-absolutist governments. which care more about general economic prosperity and less about State revenue.

Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate

Large long-run swings in the United States stock market over the past century correspond to swings in estimates of fundamental values calculated by using a long moving average of past dividend growth to forecast future growth rates. Such a procedure would have been reasonable if investors were uncertain of the structure of the economy. and had to make forecasts of unknown and possibly-changing long-run dividend growth rates. The parameters of the stochastic process followed by dividends over the twentieth century cannot be precisely estimated even today at the centurys end. Investors in the past had even less information about the dividend process. In such a context, it is difficult to see how investors can be faulted for implicitly forecasting future dividends by extrapolating past dividend growth.

How strongly do developing economies benefit from equipment investment

Abstract We extend and improve the database used in De Long and Summers (1991) and, focusing on developing economies, find that there is a very strong growth-equipment investment association even when rich industrialized economies are not considered. Rapid growth is found where equipment investment is high, and slow growth where equipment investment is low. If there is a region where the post-WWII growth-equipment nexus is weak, it is the well-integrated and very rich region of western Europe - not the developing world.

The stock market bubble of 1929: evidence from clsoed-end mutual funds

Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental†values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that the stocks making up the S & P composite were priced at least 30 percent above fundamentals in late summer, 1929.