The 1930's American Dust Bowl created archetypal "Dust Bowl migrants," refugees from environmental collapse and economic upheaval. I examine this archetype, comparing migration from more-eroded counties and less-eroded counties to distinguish Dust Bowl migrants from other migrants in this era....

During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. The amounts distributed varied widely across the country and potentially contributed to population shifts. We estimate an aggregate discrete choice model, in...

This work explores how Argentina overcame the Great Depression and asks whether active macroeconomic interventions made any contribution to the recovery. In particular, we study Argentine macroeconomic policy as it deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of...

Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of...

In this paper we analyze the evolution of the Mexican economy between 1995 and 1998. The remarkable quick recovery seen in aggregate activity has not been uniform across the economy. The tradable sector has grown strongly, while the non-tradable sector has recuperated only sluggishly. This...

There is a new and now extensive literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses often build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation, where the social planner is constrained by the same...

We explore whether the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland and subsequent economic crisis affected the probability of ischemic heart disease (IHD) events, independent of regular cyclical effects attributed to typical economic conditions. We estimate linear probability models using administrative...

Was foreign currency denominated debt a determinant of exchange rate and monetary policy during the Great Depression? Policy makers of the day thought so. High-frequency bond price data show depreciation was associated with elevated risk premia on public debt. We also show that foreign currency...

In terms of global incidence the recent crisis is fourth in ranking and comparable to 1907-08. We also calculate output losses during the recessions associated with global financial crises and again the recent crisis is similar in severity to 1907-08 and is fourth in ranking. On both dimensions...

This paper is about the size of fiscal multipliers and the sources of recovery from the Great Depression. Its baseline result is that 89.1 percent of the 1939:Q1-1941:Q4 recovery can be attributed to fiscal policy innovations, 34.1 percent to monetary policy innovations and the remaining -23.2...