Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

Using the recession recovery point equal to the month when private payrolls first exceeded their previous peak level, this paper argues that it was the negative secular trend in manufacturing jobs that was the most important determinant of the length and depth of the last three...

We argue that falling farm product prices, incomes, and spending may explain 10-30 percent of the 1930 U.S. output decline. Crop prices collapsed, reducing farmers' incomes. And across U.S. states and Ohio counties, auto sales fell most in crop-growing areas. The large spending response may be...

The NBER's pre-WWI chronology of annual peaks and troughs has the remarkable implication that the U.S. economy spent nearly every other year in recession, although previous research has argued that the post-Civil War dates are flawed. This paper extends that research by redating annual peaks and...

This paper investigates whether U.S. government spending multipliers differ according to two potentially important features of the economy: (1) the amount of slack and (2) whether interest rates are near the zero lower bound. We shed light on these questions by analyzing new quarterly historical...

Which firms relied on commercial banks for credit and which firms did not at the onset of the Great Depression would seem to be an important question given the vast literature discussing banking distress in the United States during the 1930s. The question, however, has not been answered. This...