This paper reexamines U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867. We employ dynamic factor analysis as an alternative to reconstructed national accounts. We find a remarkable volatility increase across World War I, which is reversed after World War II. While we can generate evidence of postwar...

This paper examines the comovement of the stock market and of real activity in Germany before World War I under the efficient market hypothesis. We employ multivariate spectral analysis to compare rivaling national product estimates to stock market behaviour in the frequency domain. Close...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a...

The severity of the Great Depression in Germany has sometimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations relied on American capital exports, the demise of the Gold Standard, or on malfunc¬tions of the domestic economy, such as excessive wage increases during...

A substantial body of research agrees that unit wage cost in the industrialized economies increased substantially after World War I. For Germany, the popular industrial output estimates of Hoffmann (1965) are partly based on the assumption of constant wage shares, and show rather high growth of...

Proposals for reducing high public debt are sometimes viewed with scepticism, both because of adverse consequences for growth and political economy considerations. This paper looks into the debt history of Britain, Germany and France, to gain more insights into why national debt was accumulated...

This paper assembles and reviews data on growth performance for East Germany. Conclusions are only tentative, as data reliability is still poor. Examining factor growth and total factor productivity performance, the paper arrives at three main conclusions. First, large-scale dismantling of...

The prominent role of monetary policy in the U.S. interwar depression has been conventional wisdom since Friedman and Schwartz [1963]. This paper presents evidence on both the surprise and the systematic components of monetary policy between 1929 and 1933. Doubts surrounding GDP estimates for...

This paper recasts Temin's (1976) question of whether monetary forces caused the Great Depression in a modern time series framework. We analyse money-income causalities and predict US output in a recursive Bayesian framework, allowing for information updating and time-varying coefficients. The...