This paper examines the economic environments in which past U.S. stock market booms occurred as a first step toward understanding how asset price booms come about and whether monetary policy should be used to defuse booms. We identify several episodes of sustained rapid rise in equity prices in...

The dollar's depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973 - 1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar's decline, but showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements. Only after...

In this paper we revisit the debate over the role of the banking panics in 1930-33 in precipitating the Great Contraction. The issue hinges over whether the panics were illiquidity shocks and hence in support of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) greatly exacerbated the recession which had begun in...

The Federal Reserve abandoned foreign-exchange-market intervention because it conflicted with the System's commitment to price stability. By the early 1980s, economists generally concluded that, absent a portfolio-balance channel, sterilized foreign-exchange-market intervention did not provide...

A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide...

This paper examines shifts over time in the relative demand for skilled labor in the United States. Although de-skilling in the conventional sense did occur overall in nineteenth century manufacturing, a more nuanced picture is that occupations "hollowed out": the share of "middle-skill" jobs -...

By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation...

Although the official statistics imply that the rate of growth of real GDP in the United States has declined in recent years, it has still been substantially higher than the real growth rates in Europe and the other industrial countries, leading to higher real per capita incomes. This paper...

This paper argues that the key deep underlying fundamental for the growing international imbalances leading to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973 was rising U.S. inflation since 1965. It was driven in turn by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies—the elephant in...

This paper examines the evolution of the Mexican-born workforce in the United States using data drawn from the decennial U.S. Census throughout the entire 20th century. It is well known that there has been a rapid rise in Mexican immigration to the United States in recent years. Interestingly,...