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Howard N. Bodenhorn, associate professor of economics and business at Lafayette, is author of a new volume on the history of banking in the early United States.
State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History, published by Oxford University Press, is the second major work on banking in early America by Bodenhorn, an expert in American economic and financial history, law, economics, and industrial organization.
“It has been more than 40 years since the publication of Bray Hammond’s Banks and Politics from the Revolution to the Civil War and more than 50 years since the appearance of Fritz Redlich’s The Molding of American Banking,” Bodenhorn writes. “[These] books deeply influenced economic theory and banking history and, thus, banking policy. It is notable in this regard, however, that neither book focuses on the economics of early American banking in the sense that it explicitly employs economic models and economic reasoning in the study of economic issues. . . .
“It is time for a new, genuinely economic study of early American banking markets,” Bodenhorn continues. “This book represents the first full-length treatment of early American banking in over forty years. During that time, economic historians have offered many new interpretations of several important developments in antebellum banking policy and practice. Such features of early American financial history as free banking, branch banking, deposit insurance, and microbanking have been reinterpreted. . . . Moreover, economic theory has made significant advances, and this book incorporates these theoretical insights into the interpretation of several important periods.”
Bodenhorn is also author of A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Age of Nation Building, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press. That volume, for which he conducted research under a major grant from the John M. Olin Foundation, was hailed by the field’s leading scholarly journals.
“Bodenhorn has produced a real winner in his attempt to deal with the long-standing question of the role played by commercial banks in the early economic development of the United States,” says The Journal of the Early Republic.
Scandinavian Economic History Review says, “Bodenhorn’s prime achievement is an impressive collection of a rich set of data at both the micro and macro levels, and this deserves a lot of academic attention.”
The Journal of Economic Literature says, “A new history of antebellum banking is long overdue, and Howard Bodenhorn’s new book is well worth the wait.”
The book also received favorable reviews in The Review of Austrian Economics, Business History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of American History, and American Historical Review, among others.
A member of the editorial board of the journal Explorations in Economic History, Bodenhorn has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and given many presentations at academic conferences and seminars.
He has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 2001 and is author of three NBER working papers, “The Complexion Gap: The Economic Consequences of Color Among Free African Americans in the Rural Antebellum South” (May 2002), “Partnership and Hold-Up in Early America” (February 2002), and “Short-Term Loans and Long-Term Relationships: Relationship Lending In Early America” (December 2001).
About 600 NBER members are chosen from the 10,000 or more academic economists in the U.S. Economists are nominated by their peers and appointed to NBER positions because their research is innovative and they have made significant contributions to the economics literature and to the understanding of economic phenomena. While NBER is committed to nonpartisan research, much of its work has direct policy implications, and the NBER working paper series has as much influence on academic research as any of the major economics journals.
More than a third of Nobel laureates in economics, and several current and past members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, are current or past NBER associates.
Also in 2001 Bodenhorn was awarded a $65,227 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on the economic consequences of race in the antebellum South. The grant is funding study for a book on the economic condition of free African Americans living in the antebellum United States. It also will result in numerous articles submitted to leading scholarly journals in economics and economic history.
Bodenhorn launched the project’s preliminary work with the assistance of Lafayette student Shivani Malhotra, an economics and business major from Bangalore, India. Now a senior, Malhotra was a participant in Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, in which students collaborate closely with faculty on research projects while earning a stipend.
Last school year, Bodenhorn received at $15,000 grant from the Earhart Foundation in support of the research.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1993, Bodenhorn actively involves Lafayette students in his research. In addition to engaging EXCEL research assistants, he has mentored several outstanding seniors writing in-depth theses to earn departmental honors at graduation.
One thesis, entitled “Differential Tolerances and Accepted Punishments for Disobedient Indentured Servants and Their Masters in Colonial Courts,” by Melissa A. Roe, a 1996 honors graduate in economics and business, earned the Cliometric Society’s annual award for best undergraduate essay in economic history. Another thesis was nominated for the same prize and yet another was published in revised form in Stats: The Magazine for Students of Statistics.
“EXCEL is definitely one of Lafayette’s positive points. It offers a unique experience to students and professors,” Malhotra says, adding that Bodenhorn is clear about what he wants and very helpful, taking time to explain things when she faced doubts. “The college as a whole has lived up to my expectations, and the professors and facilities are great.”
Bodenhorn says Malhotra’s contributions have been impressive. “She’s terrific, very dedicated and enthusiastic, always asking questions.”
In another extended EXCEL project, Joshua Sullivan of Pennsauken, N.J., a double major in history and economics and business, tracked and analyzed various instruments for three U.S. financial markets based on prices from newspapers in the era of the War of 1812. The newspapers reported prices on a handful of traded equity securities, government bonds, U.S.-English exchange rates, and interest rates on short-term borrowings.
“Anytime you get to work one-on-one with someone who’s working on something significant, it’s great,” Sullivan says.
Last spring Trisha Tozzi, now a senior economics and business major from Old Greenwich, Conn., investigated whether banks’ shareholders in the years 1900 and 1905 were quick to fire directors if the banks were sputtering. This summer Veronica Hart, a sophomore Trustee Scholarship recipient from Sewanee, Tennessee, is scheduled to begin researching crime, punishment, and race in Antebellum Maryland with Bodenhorn.
In 1999 Bodenhorn received the Otto Eckstein Prize for best article in Eastern Economic Journal. He was the 1993 recipient of the Arthur H. Cole Award for best article in Journal of Economic History. In 1988 he won an award from Rutgers University for teaching excellence.
He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in economics from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech.