Kris James Mitchener

I am pleased to announce that my paper Domino Secessions: Evidence from the U.S. (with Kim Oosterlink and Jean Lacroix) has been accepted for publication in the Economic Journal. We examine how the process of secession depends on the decisions of other regions. We build a model to explore the dynamics of secession and then evaluate how sub-sovereign debt can be used to examine the evolution of secession movements -- using data from the canonical case of the U.S. South in the 1860s.

I am honored to be appointed as a fellow at the Kiel Institute of World Economy beginning June 2025. You can view a Kiel policy briefing on trade and currency wars I have penned with Kirsten Wandschneider.

My paper Deposit Crunches and Bank Lending during the Great Depression (with Gary Richardson) now appears in the June 2025 issue of the Journal of Economic History (open access). Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced decline in lending explains about one-third of the reduction in aggregate commercial bank lending between 1929 and 1932, more than twice as much as attributed to the failure of banks.

My article Do Disinflation Policies Ravage Central Bank Finances (with Eric Monnet and Théodore Humann) has appears in the April 2025 issue of Economic Policy. Lots of advanced-economy central banks are realizing losses at the moment. Is this necessarily the outcome of disinflationary policies? We show that in the last major rate-tightening cycle, triggered by the so-called Volcker Shock, central banks central bank actually increased profits.  Don't have time for the full article? Read a policy briefing at VoxEU or in French at CEPII.

I recently visited Bonn University and the the House of Finance in Frankfurt  where I presented new research on state contingent bonds and ongoing research on how financial crises distribute risk.

You can here my recent commentary on trade wars on Vox and NPR's Today Explained.

My op-ed on Trade Wars appears in the Boston Globe and der Standard.

In April, I provided a policy briefing on trade to the Sveriges Riksbank in Stockholm.

My new working paper on Currency Wars and Trade (with Kirsten Wandschneider) is now available.

My research on the Smoot Hawley Trade War (published in the Economic Journal) is featured in the Economist, New York Times,  ABC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Bloomberg (gated), the Washington Post (gated), and CNBC.

I presented new research on Corporate Rebranding at a CEPR conference in Heidelberg in February 2025.

I recently presented my research on how mergers of financial institutions are an important mechanism for transferring risk during financial crises at conferences at the Sveriges Riksbank, CEPR, and CAGE (University of Warwick) as well as economics department seminars at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

I recently presented research on Connected Lending of Last Resort at a CEPR Conference on a Changing Financial Landscape in Gerzensee and at at the University Toronto's Conference on Banks, States and the People: Origins and Impacts of Banking Crises.

My article Contagion of Fear: Panics, Money, and the Great Depression appeared the July 2024 issue of Explorations in Economic History.

My paper The Effects of Countercyclical Interest Rates: Evidence from the Classical Gold Standard was recently published in the Journal of International Economics.

Ever wonder if American populism a persistent political phenomena? Using a new dataset linking county vote shares in the 1890s with recent periods, my new working paper Deep Roots: On the Persistence of American Populism with Helen Milner and Ze Han shows that populist movements in the United States indeed have deep roots. Counties where voters were enthusiastic about populist parties in the late nineteenth century had higher vote shares for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

My article Sovereign Debt in the 21st Century (with Christoph Trebesch) appearing in the Journal of Economic Literature surveys the research landscape on sovereign debt since the Eurozone Debt Crisis, providing a long-run perspective on the "lessons learned" and suggesting what issues will dominate this century. 

My recent research on pandemics and healthcare Do Pandemics Change Healthcare? Evidence from the Great Influenza  was featured at the NBER  and was recently discussed by my co-author, Melissa Thomasson on Freakonomics, M.D.