Lisa D. Cook

Trade credit and bank finance: Financing small firms in russia

Abstract This paper argues that Russian financial markets are more developed than typically supposed. I show that non-financial firms, suppliers of credit to other firms, support the role of financial intermediaries in helping to surmount problems of information asymmetries. Trade credit works as a signal; firms receiving it obtain access to bank loans. I test this hypothesis using data from my survey of 352 firms in Russia in 1995. Firms using trade credit are shown to have a higher probability of acquiring bank credit.

The mortality consequences of distinctively black names

Race-specific given names have been linked to a range of negative outcomes in contemporary studies, but little is known about their long-term consequences. Building on recent research which documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman, 2014), we analyze long-term consequences of distinctively racialized names. Using over 3 million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina from 1802 to 1970, we find a robust within-race mortality difference for African American men who had distinctively black names. Having an African American name added more than 1 year of life relative to other African American males. The result is robust to controlling for the age pattern of mortality over time and environmental factors which could drive the mortality relationship. The result is not consistently present for infant and child mortality, however. As much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man was given a black name. Suggestive evidence implies that cultural factors not captured by socioeconomic or human capital measures may be related to the mortality differential.

Converging to a National Lynching Database: Recent Developments and the Way Forward

Abstract In tandem with a recent surge in interest in lynching in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, researchers in a number of fields have begun to use lynching data in new ways for a wide range of empirical investigations. A limited number of historical national lynching data series are available, have well-known flaws, and are nonetheless used. This article analyzes and compares these series, summarizes recent efforts to address their shortcomings, and identifies extensions that could aid in the construction a national database of confirmed lynching victims, whose broader applications are just beginning to be explored.