Do steep recoveries follow deep recessions? Does it matter if a credit crunch or banking panic accompanies the recession? Moreover does it matter if the recession is associated with a housing bust? We look at the American historical experience in an attempt to answer these questions. The answers...

We construct and estimate an endogenous growth model with debt and equity financing frictions to understand the relation between business cycle fluctuations and long-term growth. The presence of spillover effects from R&D imply an endogenous relation between productivity growth and the state of...

We identify America's First Great Moderation, a recession-free 16-year period from 1841 until 1856, that represents the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Occurring in the wake of the debt-deleveraging cycle of the late 1830s, this “take-off” period's high rates of economic growth...

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...

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...

We explore two issues triggered by the crisis. First, in most advanced countries, output remains far below the pre-recession trend, suggesting hysteresis. Second, while inflation has decreased, it has decreased less than anticipated, suggesting a breakdown of the relation between inflation and...

This paper documents a long-standing stability in the relationship between outstanding debt and economic activity in the United States, and explores the implications for capital formation of several hypotheses that could explain this observed phenomenon. The aggregate of outstanding credit...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

This paper studies an economy in which incomplete markets and strong complementarities interact to generate path dependent aggregate output fluctuations. An economy is said to be path dependent when the effect of a shock on the level of aggregate output is permanent in the absence of future...

From March to July 1933, industrial production rose 57 percent. We show that an important source of recovery was the effect of dollar devaluation on farm prices, incomes, and consumption. Devaluation immediately raised traded crop prices, and auto sales grew more rapidly in states and counties...