This essay reviews Barry Eichengreen's recent book that compares the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Eichengreen focuses on deficient aggregate demand as the key reason for why both downturns were so deep and why they lasted so long. I assess the book's arguments regarding the causes...

This paper discusses parallels between our current recession and the Great Depression for the intelligent general public. It stresses the role of economic models and ideas in public policy and argues that gold-standard mentality still holds sway today. The parallels are greatest in the...

We develop a model in which the capital of the intermediary sector plays a critical role in determining asset prices. The model is cast within a dynamic general equilibrium economy, and the role for intermediation is derived endogenously based on optimal contracting considerations. Low...

In the summer of 1931, a financial crisis began in Austria, spread to Germany, forced Britain to abandon the gold standard, crossed the Atlantic, and afflicted financial institutions in the United States. This article describes how banks in New York City, the central money market of the United...

We examine the impact of the Great Recession on charitable giving. We find sharp declines in overall donative behavior that is not accounted for by shocks to income or wealth. These results suggest that overall attitudes towards giving changed over this time period

The global economy has been buffeted by several unprecedented economic events during the past 35 years. We survey the impact of these events on Israel's development, institutions, and economic policies. Israel had a remarkable development during this time, from a low income high-inflation...

Mobility within the European Union (EU) brings great opportunities and large overall benefits. Economically stagnant areas, however, may be deprived of talent through emigration, which may harm dynamism and delay political, and economic, change. A significant episode of emigration took place...

We propose an overlapping generations New Keynesian model in which a permanent (or very persistent) slump is possible without any self-correcting force to full employment. The trigger for the slump is a deleveraging shock, which creates an oversupply of savings. Other forces that work in the...

We provide a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call Dynamic Pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of DSGE models with and without financial frictions for output growth and inflation from 1992 to 2011. We...