@techreport{NBERw18616,
 title = "Harvests and Financial Crises in Gold-Standard America",
 author = "Christopher Hanes and Paul W. Rhode",
 institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
 type = "Working Paper",
 series = "Working Paper Series",
 number = "18616",
 year = "2012",
 month = "December",
 URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w18616",
 abstract = {Most American financial crises of the postbellum gold-standard era were caused by fluctuations in the cotton harvest due to exogenous factors such as weather. The transmission channel ran through  export revenues and financial markets under the pre-1914 monetary regime. A poor cotton harvest depressed export revenues and reduced international demand for American assets, which depressed American stock prices, drained deposits from money-center banks and precipitated a business-cycle downturn - conditions that bred financial crises. The crises caused by cotton harvests could have been prevented by an American central bank, even under gold-standard constraints.},
}