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...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

This paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 US Census micro data. The aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor. In order to identify a source of exogenous variation in child labor I use State-specific child labor...

We model differences among agents in their ability to recognise temporal patterns of prices. Using the concept of DeBruijin sequences in two dynamic models of markets, we demonstrate the existence of equilibria in which prices fluctuate in a pattern that is independent of the fundamentals and...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the cyclical behavior of US unemployment that poses a challenge to standard search and matching models. The correlation between cyclical unemployment and the cyclical component of labor productivity switched sign at the beginning of the Great...

Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (iii) poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks...

Shimer (2005a) claims that the Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment lacks an ampiflication mechanism because it cannot generate the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivity shocks of plausible magnitude. This paper argues that part of the problem...

This paper studies the variable impact of the global economic crisis on the post-communist countries of South East Europe and Turkey. The central question is whether the institutional reforms introduced in the former group of countries during the transition period have improved their ability to...