I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers' acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass'...

We evaluate the role played by loan supply shocks in the decline of investment and industrial production during the Great Depression in Germany from 1927 to 1932. We identify loan supply shocks in the context of a time varying parameter vector autoregression with stochastic volatility. Our...

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...