Farley Grubb

Farley Grubb is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Delaware and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.. He received his BA in 1977 in Economics, History, and Philosophy from the University of Washington, Seattle; and his AM in 1981 and PhD in 1984 in Economics from the University of Chicago. In doing this degree work, he took numerous classes from such eminent economists as Douglass North, Robert Fogel, Gary Becker, George Stigler, and Robert Lucas.

Since 1983, he has taught at the University of Delaware while occasionally holding temporary visiting positions at the University of Illinois-Champaign, Harvard University, and the Universite Lumiere Lyon 2. He has published numerous articles on immigrant contract labor and on monetary regimes during the colonial and early republican periods in U.S. history–mostly notably in the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, and the American Economic Review.

His published works on early American monetary regimes most germane to legal issues, constitutional law, and the politics of governance are:

• “State Redemption of the Continental Dollar, 1779-90,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 69, no. 1 (Jan. 2012), pp. 147-180.
• “U.S. Land Policy: Founding Choices and Outcomes, 1781-1802,” in Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla, eds., Founding Choices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and NBER, 2011), pp. 259-289;
• “Testing for the Economic Impact of the U.S. Constitution: Purchasing Power Parity across the Colonies Versus across the States, 1748-1811,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 70, no. 1 (Mar. 2010), pp. 118-145;
• “The Net Worth of the U.S. Federal Government, 1784-1802,” American Economic Review—Papers and Proceedings, vol. 97, no. 2 (May 2007), pp. 280-284;
• “The U.S. Constitution and Monetary Powers: An Analysis of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Transformation of the U.S. Monetary System,” Financial History Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (Apr. 2006), pp. 43-71;
• “State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Reply—Including a New View from Canada,” American Economic Review, 95 (Sept. 2005), pp. 1341-1348; and
• “Creating the U.S.-Dollar Currency Union, 1748-1811: A Quest for Monetary Stability or a Usurpation of State Sovereignty for Personal Gain?” American Economic Review, 93 (Dec. 2003), pp. 1778-1798.