Presents the empirical data of business cycles and the theories that economists have developed to explain and prevent them, and considers case studies of recessions and depressions in the United States and internationally.

This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to agency problems and funding liquidity risk in their inter- mediation activity....

It has become commonplace to raise the analogy between the recent experience of the dynamics of income distribution and growth, and that of the era before the Great Depression. However, no study of the demand regime has been done for the early twentieth century period; this study attempts to fill...