This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...

The US Great Depression was preceded by almost a decade of credit growth. This review paper suggests that the 1920s credit boom went through two phases: one, up to around 1927, when credit grew in concert with money; another one, from around 1928 to 1929, when credit grew faster than money....

This paper constructs the first repeat sales house price index in United States history before 1950, using data from Baltimore. It shows that house prices fell more during the 1890s and 1930s than existing data indicate. As a result, while previous data suggest most borrowers should have been...

Using new quarterly U.S. data for the past 120 years, I show that sudden reversals in equity and credit market sentiment approximated by several measures of corporate securities issuance are highly predictive of banking crises and recessions. Deviations in equity issuance from historical...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...

Price indices for periods before the Second World War place more weight on less-processed products than do their post-war counterparts, to an extent that exaggerates the change over time in the composition of aggregate output. Prices of less-processed products are especially procyclical in...

This paper quantitatively investigates the Depression of the 1890s and the 1907 recession in the United States. Business Cycle Accounting decomposes economic fluctuations into their contributing factors. The results suggest that both the 1890s and the 1907 recessions were primarily caused by...

This paper presents a monetary explanation the US recession of 1797. Credit expansion initiated by Bank of the United States in the early 1790s unleashed a bout of inflation and low real interest rates which spurred a speculative investment bubble in real estate and capital intensive...