Today FDR's New Deal is regarded as the democratic ideal, the positive American response to the economic crisis that propelled Germany and Italy toward Fascism. Yet in the 1930s, these regimes were hardly considered antithetical. Cultural historian Schivelbusch investigates their shared elements...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...