John Allen James: A scholarly remembrance

John entered the MIT graduate program during the early, lofty days of the “new” economic history, and emerged as one of its most deft, sensible and versatile practitioners. His PhD dissertation—directed by Peter Temin—exemplifies the promise of this new approach to historical analysis. It addresses a central issue in American political economic development, the formation of a more integrated (or “perfect”) money market in the late nineteenth-century. Influenced by the earlier contributions of Lance Davis and Richard Sylla, John set out to document systematically the timing and spatial extent of this financial innovation, and then to explain why it occurred where and when it did. He adapted current finance theory (CAPM) to the historical context by incorporating possible market imperfections due to spatial factors such as local market power.(...)