We employ a unique data set of public commercial real estate (CRE) bonds issued during the Great Depression era (1920-32) to determine their frequency of default and total loss given default. Default rates on these bonds far exceeded those originated in subsequent periods, driven in part by the...

This paper outlines a simple Bayesian methodology for estimating tax and spending multipliers in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. After forming priors about the parameters of the model and the relevant shock, we used the model to exactly match only one data point: the...

Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary conomics - the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...

Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper studies this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal frictions and shows that these policies are expansionary when certain "emergency" conditions apply....

There is now a great deal of empirical evidence that business cycle fluctuations contain asymmetries. The asymmetries found in post-war U.S. data are inconsistent with the behavior of the U.S. economy in the Great Depression. In a model where business cycle asymmetries are produced by rational...

This paper argues that the U.S. economy's recovery from the Great Depression was driven by a shift in expectations brought about by the policy actions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and-even more important-announced the...

Remarks at Dominican College, Orangeburg, New York.