More than fifty years ago, Friedman and Schwartz examined historical data for the United States and found evidence of pro-cyclical movements in the money stock, which led corresponding movements in output. We find similar correlations in more recent data; these appear most clearly when Divisia...

The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based...

Financial intermediaries borrow in order to lend. When credit is increasing rapidly, the traditional deposit funding (core liabilities) is supplemented with other funding (non-core liabilities). We explore the hypothesis that monetary aggregates reflect the size of non-core and core liabilities...

This paper reexamines the debate over whether the United States fell into a liquidity trap in the 1930s. We first review the literature on the liquidity trap focusing on Keynes's discussion of "absolute liquidity preference" and the division that soon emerged between Keynes, who believed that a...

This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is...

Fluctuations of business activity in the United States clearly have their monetary and financial side, but these aspects of U.S. economic fluctuations exhibit few quantitative regularities that have persisted unchanged across spans of tine over which the nation's financial markets have...

This paper examines the role of aggregate demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. A simple calculation indicates that nearly all of the observed recovery of the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was due to monetary expansion. Huge gold inflows in the mid- and late-1930s swelled the U.S. money...

We test the hypothesis that the Great Contraction would have been attenuated had the Fed not allowed the money stock to decline. We do so by simulating a model that estimates separate relations for output and the price level and assumes that output and price dynamics are not especially sensitive...

The quality of the money stock declined during the banking crises of the early 1930s. Bank deposits did not serve as a secure short- term store of purchasing power for use in an emergency as well as they had previously, and during the periods of restricted deposits in late 1932 and early 1933,...

In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled the reserve requirements imposed on member banks. Ever since, the question of whether the doubling of reserve requirements increased reserve demand and produced a contraction of money and credit, and thereby helped to cause the recession of 1937-1938, has...