Drawing from the personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, we uncover and report in this paper new evidence that Nixon manipulated Arthur Burns and the Federal Reserve Bank into creating a political business cycle that helped secure Nixon’s reelection victory in...

While federal financial rescues have become a common response to crises, federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. One man, Eugene Meyer, is largely responsible for the origin of federal financial rescues, through both the War Finance Corporation...

While federal financial rescues have become a common response to crises, federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. One man, Eugene Meyer, is largely responsible for the origin of federal financial rescues, through both the War Finance Corporation...

In 1918 the United States Treasury delegated to the War Finance Corporation, a newly-created off-budget federal agency, the task of buying Liberty and later victory bonds in an effort to stabilize prices. Bayesian vector autoregression analysis of the bond purchase indicate that the WFC purchase...

Eugene Meyer was a highly respected financier and government official when he was appointed Governor of the Federal Reserve Board in 1930. Through his force of character, he dominated economic policy making during the last years of Hoover’s administration. He initially found that sizable...

This paper investigates the relationship between capital account openness and growth. Our empirical investigation of the effects of capital restrictions on growth provides evidence supporting capital account liberalization, especially for developed countries. We also show that capital...

On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon imposed the first and only peacetime wage and price controls in U.S. history. The Nixon tapes, personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, are now available to the public and provide a unique body of evidence to investigate the...

Recent studies have demonstrated the ability of the interest rate yield spread to predict post-war business cycles. This same methodology is applied to the prediction of interwar business cycles in the United States and the United Kingdom. The spread predicts the early interwar cycles, although...

While federal financial intermediation in widely accepted, federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. Federal financial intermediation began during WW I through the War Finance Corporation (WFC). When the Wilson administration wanted to end the...

This paper reports the results of a study of the impact of government expenditures on economic growth, emphasizing how government effectiveness in developing nations influences the productivity of government spending. The effects of categories of government spending on growth are also examined....