The economic downturn which had begun in the rich countries of the North is hurting the millions of innocent people of the developing South. While a large section of economist believe that the financial crisis that had began in America's sub-prime mortgage market, later snow balled into a global...

Today, the world economy is at the brink of a major recession at zero lower bound. The recession has been fomented by the underconsumption induced by (i) the increasing income inequality, which is inherent in the neoliberal policymaking followed the last third of a century, and (ii) the...

The goal of this paper is to provide stylized facts on recovery from economic downturns and to evaluate the role of macroeconomic policies in promoting recovery. In particular, we examine gross domestic product (GDP) recessions and financial downturns (credit contractions and stock price...

We evaluate and partially challenge the 'household leverage' view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes...

This paper investigates the sources of macrofinancial fluctuations and turbulence within the framework of an approximate linear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the world economy, augmented with structural shocks exhibiting potentially asymmetric generalized autoregressive...

The current recession is poorly understood. It is a combination of a very rare consumer debt limit recession and a very rare balance sheet recession. That makes it unique, dangerous and long lasting. It is leading to an extended period of low double digit unemployment that will be very hard to...

We document sectoral differences in changes in output, hours worked, prices, and nominal wages in the United States during the Great Depression. We explore whether contractionary monetary shocks combined with different degrees of nominal wage frictions across sectors are consistent with both...

Canadian GNP per capita fell by roughly a third between 1928 and 1933. Although the decline and the slow recovery of GNP resemble the American Great Depression, trade was more important in Canada, as exports and imports each accounted for roughly a quarter of Canadian GNP in 1928. The fall in...

In this paper we: (i) provide a model of endogenous risk intolerance and serve aggregate demand contractions following a large (non-financial) shock; and (ii) demonstrate the effectiveness of Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) in addressing these contractions. The key mechanism stems from...

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...