John J. Wallis


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Early 19th Century United States

The most active area of research over the last decade has been the early 19th century. My focus is the evolution of American government from the Constitution through the Civil War, with particular emphasis on public finance at the state level.

Banking:

  • Sylla, Richard, John B. Legler, and John Joseph Wallis. "Banks and State Public Finance in the New Republic." Journal of Economic History, 47 1987.

  • Wallis, John Joseph, Richard E. Sylla, and John B. Legler. (1994), "The Interaction of Taxation and Regulation of Banks in early Nineteenth Century America" in C. Goldin and G. Libecap, eds. The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 121-44.

The second set of papers about the default crisis, again with Sylla:

  • Sylla, Richard and John Joseph Wallis. (1998) "The Anatomy of a Sovereign Debt Crisis." Japan and the World Economy.

  • Wallis, John Joseph, Richard Sylla, and Arthur Grinath, "Sovereign Default and Repudiation: The Emerging Market Debt Crisis in the United States, 1839-1843." Available as an NBER working paper. An earlier version of this paper appeared as an NBER working paper, "Debt, Default, and Revenue Structure." This paper has been submitted to the Journal of Economic History.

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    The third set of papers include three NBER working papers:

    • "What Caused the Crisis of 1839?" NBER Working Paper, 2001.

    • "The Property Tax as a Coordinating Device: Financing Indiana's Mammoth Internal Improvement System." NBER Working Paper, 2001. This paper was published in Explorations in Economic History, July, 2003.

    • "The Market for American State Government Bonds in Britain and the United States, 1830 to 1843. " With Namsuk Kim, Mimeo, NBER Working Paper Historical Factors in Long Run Growth #w10108. Economic History Review, November 2005.

       

    The NBER version of the 1839 paper has been supplanted by more recent versions. I am currently working on a revise and resubmit of the "1839" paper for the Journal of Economic History. The current version is called "The Depression of 1839 to 1843: States, Debts, and Banks." 

    A fourth set of papers is about government promotion of economic development more generally in the early 19th century. These papers came out (or are coming out) in conference volumes. These are all speculative, thinking aloud pieces.

  • "Early American Federalism and Economic Development, 1790-1840" Environmental and public economics: essays in honor of Wallace E. Oates, edited by Portnoy, Schwab and Panagariya. Edward Elgar, 1999.

  • Wallis, John Joseph (2000) "State Constitutional Reform and the Structure of Government Finance in the Nineteenth Century" in J. Heckelman, J. Moorhouse, and R. Whaples, (eds) Public Choice Interpretations of American Economic History, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.

  • "Market Augmenting Government? The State and the Corporation in 19th Century America" in Omar Azfar and Charles Cadwell, ed. Market-Augmenting Government: The Institutional Foundations for Prosperity. University of Michigan Press, 2002

  • "The Public Promotion of Private Interest (Groups)" in Collective Choice: Essays in Honor of Mancur Olson, edited by Jac Heckelman and Dennis Coates, Springer-Verlag, 2003.

    • A fifth set of papers covers government finance over a longer period of time. These might help give you a better perspective on the bigger picture of American public finance.

    • "American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2000.

    • "A History of the Property Tax in America," in Property Taxation and Local Government Finance, Wallace E. Oates, ed. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2001.

    The final set of papers address the issue of fiscal choice in the early 19th century. The first is called the "constitution" paper. It traces how states changed their constitutions in the 1840s to respond to the problems revealed by the crisis of the 1830s, and in response to the larger problem of government corruption.  It was published in the Journal of Economic History, June 2005.

    • "Constitutions, Corporations, and Corruption: American States and Constitutional Change, 1842 to 1852." [pdf file]

    The constitution paper is the basis for a paper with Barry Weingast on the inability of the federal government to pursue internal improvement investments.

    • "Equilibrium Federal Impotence: Why the States and not the American National Government Financed Infrastructure Investments in the Antebellum Era." [pdf file]

    This paper is still in working draft change. A recent version is on the web page, but is being changed regularly.

    And last, but not least, is a large paper on the concept of systematic corruption in American political and economic history. It was prepared for the NBER conference on Corruption and Reform organized by Claudia Goldin and Ed Glaeser, held in July 2004 in Salem, MA.  It was published in Corruption and Reform, edited by Glaeser and Goldin, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

    • "The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American Political and Economic History." [pdf file]