Pawel Janas

Pawel Janas

Assistant Professor of Economics, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Website: https://paweljanas.com

Email: pawel@caltech.edu

Research Overview

I am an economic historian working at the intersection of finance, public economics, and economic history. My research examines how financial institutions, financial crises, and government policy shape long-run economic development.

A common feature of my work is the construction of new historical datasets from archival sources combined with modern empirical methods. Much of my research studies the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the Great Depression.

Primary Research Areas

  • Economic history
  • Finance
  • Public economics
  • Banking
  • Insurance
  • Financial crises
  • Municipal finance
  • Labor markets
  • Urban economics
  • Applied microeconomics

Research Themes

Financial Intermediaries

How banks and insurance companies allocate risk, respond to crises, and influence economic growth.

Keywords: banking, insurance, financial intermediation, lender of last resort, financial stability, risk sharing

Financial Crises

How financial crises affect firms, households, migration, employment, and long-run development. Keywords: Great Depression, banking crises, recovery, labor markets, manufacturing

Local Public Finance

How municipal borrowing and financial distress affect public investment and public services. Keywords: municipal finance, public debt, infrastructure, local government, fiscal policy

Historical Data Construction

Building new firm-level, county-level, and city-level historical datasets from archival records. Keywords: digitization, historical archives, panel data, linked microdata

Research Projects

Lender of Last Resort and Local Economic Outcomes

Status: Forthcoming at the Financial History Review

Research question: How did emergency liquidity support during the Great Depression affect local economic development?

Summary: This paper studies the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s lender-of-last-resort policies during the 1930–31 banking crisis. Using newly digitized county-level banking and manufacturing records together with linked Census microdata, the paper estimates the causal effects of financial stabilization on manufacturing, migration, and labor market outcomes.

Main findings:

  • Lender-of-last-resort policies substantially reduced bank failures.
  • Manufacturing counties receiving greater financial stabilization experienced stronger long-run employment outcomes.
  • Residents were less likely to migrate away and more likely to remain employed in manufacturing.
  • Effects were strongest for younger and less-educated workers.

Methods and data:

  • Natural experiment
  • Border discontinuity
  • Difference-in-differences
  • Historical archival data

Contribution: Provides causal evidence that Federal Reserve lender-of-last-resort policies during the Great Depression generated lasting improvements in local economic outcomes by preventing bank failures and supporting manufacturing, employment, and population retention.

Keywords: Great Depression, banking, lender of last resort, Federal Reserve, manufacturing, labor markets, migration, financial crises.  

Public Goods Under Financial Distress

Status: Published at the Journal of Financial Economics

Citation: Janas, P. (2026). Public Goods Under Financial Distress. Journal of Financial Economics, 176: 104205.

Research question: How does municipal debt affect local public services during fiscal distress?

Summary: This paper examines how differences in municipal debt burdens shaped local government responses during the Great Depression. Using newly assembled data on municipal finances and public expenditures, it estimates how fiscal constraints affected spending, public employment, and investment in local public services.

Main findings

  • Municipalities with higher pre-Depression debt burdens made substantially larger cuts to public spending during the Great Depression.
  • Financially constrained cities reduced both operating expenditures and capital investment.
  • Public-sector employment declined more in highly indebted municipalities.
  • Fiscal distress had persistent effects on the provision of local public goods, indicating that borrowing constraints amplified the local consequences of the Depression.

Methods and data

  • Difference-in-differences
  • Panel data analysis of U.S. municipalities
  • Variation in pre-Depression municipal financial leverage
  • Historical municipal finance records
  • Historical Statistics of Cities
  • U.S. Census of Governments and municipal finance publications
  • City-level demographic and economic controls

Keywords: municipal finance, public debt, fiscal distress, public goods, local government, Great Depression, economic history, public economics

Contribution: Shows that municipal balance-sheet strength was an important determinant of local governments’ ability to maintain public services during the Great Depression, highlighting how fiscal constraints can amplify economic downturns.

Crises and Educational Attainment

Status: Published at the Journal of Economic History

Citation: Janas, P. (2026). Crises and Educational Attainment. The Journal of Economic History, 86(2), 501–536.

Research question: How do economic crises affect educational attainment, and to what extent do deteriorating labor market opportunities influence young people’s decisions to remain in school?

Summary: This paper studies how the Great Depression affected educational attainment in the United States. It examines whether declining employment opportunities during the 1930s changed the incentives facing young workers and encouraged greater investment in education. Using newly constructed measures of local economic conditions and individual-level Census data, the paper investigates how exposure to unemployment during the Great Depression affected high school completion. The analysis focuses on how labor market conditions shaped educational decisions at a critical stage of human capital formation.

Main findings

  • Higher local unemployment during the Great Depression increased educational attainment among young people.
  • The effect was substantially larger among young men.
  • The results suggest that weak labor market opportunities reduced the opportunity cost of schooling and encouraged additional investment in human capital.
  • Economic downturns can have heterogeneous effects: while recessions reduce current employment opportunities, they may also increase educational investment among groups able to remain in school.

Methods and data:

  • Difference-in-differences estimation
  • Individual-level regression analysis
  • Local labor market variation
  • Historical quasi-experimental research design
  • Robustness checks using alternative measures of economic distress
  • 1940 U.S. Census microdata
  • Historical measures of unemployment and local economic conditions
  • State and county-level economic indicators from the Great Depression period

Contribution: This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between economic crises and human capital investment by showing that recessions can increase educational attainment when employment opportunities deteriorate. It provides historical evidence that labor market shocks influence schooling decisions through changes in the opportunity cost of education. The paper also contributes to economic history by using the Great Depression as a large-scale natural experiment to study how individuals responded to severe economic disruption and by demonstrating the importance of considering both the negative and adaptive responses to economic crises.

Keywords: economic history, Great Depression, education, human capital, unemployment, labor markets, schooling decisions, youth employment, Census microdata, economic crises, educational attainment

Correlation in Local and State Taxes

Status: Published at the Journal of Public Economics

Citation:
Baker, S. R., Janas, P., & Kueng, L. (2025). Correlation in state and local tax changes. Journal of Public Economics, 242, 105275

Research question: When researchers use changes in state and local taxes to estimate causal effects, how often do other taxes change at the same time? Do tax reforms represent isolated policy changes, or are they part of broader fiscal adjustments involving multiple taxes and levels of government?

Summary: This paper studies the correlation between state and local tax changes in the United States. Empirical research in public economics frequently uses variation in tax policies as a source of identification, but a key challenge is that changes in one tax may coincide with changes in other taxes, potentially complicating causal interpretation. To address this issue, the paper constructs a comprehensive new dataset of state and local tax rates and revenues covering major tax categories—including personal income, corporate income, property, sales, and excise taxes. The paper uses this dataset to document how tax policies co-move within jurisdictions and across levels of government.  

Main findings

  • Tax changes are highly correlated within jurisdictions. When one type of state tax changes, other state taxes are significantly more likely to change in the same year. A change in one tax type can more than double the probability that another tax type changes simultaneously.  
  • State and local tax policies are interconnected. Local tax changes often occur alongside tax changes enacted by the state government in which the locality is located.  
  • Tax co-movement can affect empirical estimates. Ignoring correlated tax changes can bias estimates of tax elasticities upward.

Methods and data

  • Construction of a comprehensive tax policy dataset
  • Analysis of within-jurisdiction tax correlations
  • Cross-jurisdiction comparisons
  • Estimation of how correlated tax changes affect empirical elasticity estimates
  • Analysis of state-local fiscal interactions

New dataset of U.S. state and local tax rates and revenues:

  • State taxes: 1977–2022
  • Local taxes: 2000–2022
  • Geographic levels:
    • States
    • Counties/local jurisdictions
  • Tax categories:
    • Personal income taxes
    • Corporate income taxes
    • Property taxes
    • Sales taxes
    • Excise taxes  

Contribution: This paper provides the first comprehensive evidence on the joint movement of state and local tax policies across major tax categories. It contributes to public economics by identifying an important empirical challenge: tax changes used as sources of identification rarely occur in isolation. The paper also contributes a new publicly useful dataset that allows researchers to study tax policy changes while accounting for simultaneous adjustments in other taxes and across levels of government. More broadly, the paper improves the interpretation of empirical research using tax variation by showing when single-tax estimates may capture broader fiscal packages rather than isolated policy changes.

Keywords: public finance, fiscal policy, taxation, state taxes, local taxes, fiscal federalism, tax elasticity, tax policy, government revenue, empirical public economics, state and local government taxation, local taxation, government revenue, tax policy, intergovernmental relations, economic history, local government finance

Teaching Overview

Teaching areas:

  • Data science for economics and finance
  • Economic history
  • Quantitative methods
  • Applied empirical economics

Teaching Philosophy: My teaching focuses on developing students’ ability to think and communicate like empirical economists. Courses combine economic theory, historical context, quantitative methods, and hands-on data analysis to help students understand how economists formulate questions, construct evidence, and evaluate claims. A central goal of my teaching is to move beyond learning technical tools alone. Students learn how to identify important questions, build and analyze datasets, distinguish correlation from causation, interpret empirical results, and communicate evidence-based conclusions.

Courses Taught

BEM 106: Data Science in Economics and Finance

Level: Undergraduate

Course description: BEM 106 introduces students to the principles and practice of data science in economics and finance. The course emphasizes the full empirical research pipeline: formulating questions, constructing datasets, representing data, estimating models, evaluating predictions, and translating results into decisions.  Students learn how modern economists combine statistical methods, machine learning, and computational tools to analyze economic and financial data.

Learning objectives

  • Design empirical research projects
  • Construct and clean economic datasets
  • Apply regression and machine learning methods
  • Distinguish prediction from causal inference
  • Evaluate model performance and limitations
  • Analyze structured and unstructured data
  • Use large language models in empirical workflows
  • Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs

Topics covered

  • Data science workflows in economics and finance
  • Regression and statistical modeling
  • Prediction versus causal inference
  • Model evaluation
  • Heterogeneous effects
  • Machine learning methods
  • Text analysis
  • Natural language processing
  • Large language models in economics and finance
  • Data construction and reproducibility

EC 129: Quantitative Macroeconomic Growth of the United States

Level: Undergraduate

Course description: EC 129 examines the economic growth of the United States over the past 125 years, combining economic theory, quantitative evidence, and historical analysis. The course studies the major forces shaping long-run development, including institutions, technology, geography, migration, human capital, financial crises, government policy, and inequality.  

Learning objectives:

  • Understand major patterns in U.S. economic growth
  • Use economic theory to interpret historical events
  • Analyze historical evidence using modern empirical methods
  • Critically evaluate academic research
  • Connect economic models with real-world historical experiences

Topics covered:

  • Measurement of economic growth
  • Institutions and economic development
  • Technology and productivity
  • Migration and local labor markets
  • Education and human capital
  • Industrialization and structural transformation
  • Financial crises
  • Government intervention
  • Income and wealth inequality

SS 229: Graduate Economic History

Level: PhD

Course description: SS 229 is a graduate seminar designed for students interested in economic history research or applying economic history methods to their own research. The course focuses on reading, evaluating, and producing academic research in economic history.  

Frequently Asked Questions

What topics does Pawel Janas study?

Economic history, finance, public economics, banking, insurance, municipal finance, and the Great Depression.

What historical period does most of the research cover?

Primarily the United States between approximately 1880 and 1945, with a particular emphasis on the Great Depression.

What kinds of data are used?

Census microdata, banking records, insurance company reports, municipal finance records, and newly digitized historical datasets.

What is the central research question across these projects?

How do financial institutions and public finance shape long-run economic development and economic resilience?

Citation

Janas, Pawel. Summary. Retrieved from https://paweljanas.com