A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypotheses. We...

F. A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, so 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the event. The paper traces how Hayek came to write the book, who his opponents were, and how the book got interpreted by both friends and critics after its publication. Because the book is more typically...

Max Weber's relationship to economics in general and to the Austrian School in particular has received more attention recently. However, this literature as conducted by Weber scholars and by Austrian economists exhibits two major deficiencies. First, the studies are often either purely...

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...

We propose a nonparametric test that distinguishes “depressions” and “booms” from ordinary recessions and expansions. Depressions and booms are defined as coming from another underlying process than recessions and expansions. We find four depressions and booms in the NBER business cycle...