The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the economics of the Great Depression. If there is anything approaching a consensus, it is a synthetic view which admits a role both for monetary policy mistakes and for the international monetary and financial system in transmitting those...

This paper, written primarily for historians, attempts to explain why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which we and others have documented...

We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing anti-system parties in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered...

We review the modern history of financial crises, providing a context for analyses of the world's recent bout of financial instability. Along with indicators of economic performance in the subject countries, we present a comprehensive description of multilateral rescue efforts spanning the last...

We describe in this essay why the gold standard and the euro are extreme forms of fixed exchange rates, and how these policies had their most potent effects in the worst peaceful economic periods in modern times. While we are lucky to have avoided another catastrophe like the Great Depression in...

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. It may still be too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy responses, but it is possible to analyze monetary and fiscal policies in the...

The Great Depression was marked by a severe outbreak of protectionist trade policies. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade barriers, there was substantial cross-country variation in the movement to protectionism. Specifically, countries that remained on the...