In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe's Great Depression. I argue that Europe could not exploit her vast economic potential after 1918, because the war had not yet come to an end - indeed it did not end before 1945. Both, domestic and international...

This paper reconsiders the role of monetary policy in Sweden's strong recovery from the Great Depression. The Riksbank in the 1930s is sometimes seen as an example of a central bank that was relatively innovative in terms of the conduct of monetary policy. To consider this analytically, we...

How sticky were wages during the Great Depression? Although classic accounts emphasize the importance of nominal rigidity in amplifying deflationary shocks, the evidence is limited. In this paper, I calculate the degree of nominal wage rigidity in the United Kingdom between the wars using new...

This paper provides a political economy perspective on gold standard adoption in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which joined the monetary system in midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the high relative costs faced by a peripheral country like...