Tag Archives: Great Depression

So last weekend I was at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, and I presented with Steve Bannister (on and off contributor to NK) a paper on Quantitative Easing in the 1930s. It's been a while since we looked at this work, which started long ago (4 years at least). One point worth noticing is that while most accounts of Eccles performance at the Fed suggest that he didn't do much (see Meltzer in his A History of the Federal Reserve), we suggest that he was crucial in pushing...

I've been reading Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World), that I bought at the ASSA Meeting in San Francisco. There is a wealth of data. One topic discussed here before was the expansion of credit in the 1920s, and the role of the housing market in the boom of the roaring 20s. Gordon says with respect to the housing market: “One reason homeownership rates soared in the 1920s...

So I teach a course on the two (old syllabus here). One of the initial classes looks at Eichengreen and O'Rourke's comparison of the two events, and how, even though at the beginning the shock seemed similar, the recovery has been faster the second time. O'Rourke had noticed in his blog last year that the current recovery started way before, but has been so slow that now the 1930s look better when industrial output (rather than GDP) is used as a measure. Below the same data for the US...

New Working Paper by Ahmad Borazan. From the abstract: It has become commonplace to raise the analogy between the recent experience of the dynamics of income distribution and growth, and that of the era before the Great Depression. However, no study of the demand regime has been done for the early twentieth century period; this study attempts to fill that gap in the literature. Based on a Kaldorian model, I estimate whether the demand regime of the pre-Great Depression era for private...