TY  - JOUR
AU  - Davis,Joseph H.
AU  - Hanes,Christopher
AU  - Rhode,Paul W.
TI  - Harvests and Business Cycles in Nineteenth-Century America
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14686
PY  - 2009
Y2  - January 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14686
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14686.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Christopher Hanes
Dept. of Economics
SUNY Binghamton
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
E-Mail: chanes@binghamton.edu

Paul Rhode
Economics Department
University of Michigan
205 Lorch Hall
611 Tappan St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/647-5603
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: pwrhode@umich.edu
AB  - Most major American industrial business cycles from around 1880 to the First World War were caused by fluctuations in the size of the cotton harvest due to economically exogenous factors such as weather. Wheat and corn harvests did not affect industrial production; nor did the cotton harvest before the late 1870s. The unique effect of the cotton harvest in this period can be explained as an essentially monetary phenomenon, the result of interactions between harvests, international gold flows and high-powered money demand under America's gold-standard regime of 1879-1914.
ER  -