This article examines the performance of various financial variables as predictors of subsequent U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, currencies, and monetary aggregates are evaluated singly and in comparison with other financial and non-financial indicators....

This paper examines fifteen historical episodes of stock market crashes and their aftermath in the United States over the last one hundred years. Our basic conclusion from studying these episodes is that financial instability is the key problem facing monetary policy makers and not stock market...

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...

A number of explanations for the severity of the Great Depression focus on the malfunctioning of the international monetary system. One such explanation emphasizes the deflationary monetary consequences of the liquidation of foreign-exchange reserves following competitive devaluations by Great...

Economic histories of the interwar years view the Great Depression and the Smoot Hawley Tariff as inextricably bound up with one another. They assign a central role to the Depression in explaining the passage of the 1930 Tariff Act and at the same time emphasize the role of the tariff in the...

Currency depreciation in the 1930s is almost universally dismissed or condemned. It is credited with providing little if any stimulus for economic recovery in the depreciating countries and blamed for transmitting harmful beggar-thy-neighbor impulses to the rest of the world econonv. In this...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last 2/3 of the 20th century absent the Great Depression but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: WWII and II and the Cold War. We argue that without the Depression the...

This paper analyzes the "debt crisis" of the 1930s to see what light this historical experience sheds on recent difficulties in international capital markets. We first consider patterns of overseas lending and borrowing in the 1920s and 1930s, comparing the performance of standard models of...

This paper analyzes the sovereign defaults of the 1930s and their implications for the debt crisis of the 1980s. It reports nine major findings. There is little evidence that financial markets have grown more sophisticated' over time, or that banks have a comparative advantage over the bond...

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...