This article provides an interpretative overview of the papers in this special issue of JIMF devoted to international aspects of the 2007–2009 financial crisis. It then goes on to provide additional empirical evidence of two sorts. The first documents the difference between the monetary...

In historical accounts of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Switzerland is known for its staunch defense of the gold standard and the rise of corporatist policies. Yet, so far, the literature has not discussed the implications of these two features. This paper tries to show how the...

The Great Depression reached a turning point in the currency crises of 1931 and the German banking and currency crisis was a critical event whose causes are still debated. We demonstrate in this paper that the crisis was primarily domestic in origin; that it was a currency crisis rather than a...

We apply a dynamic general equilibrium model to the period of the Great Depression. In particular, we examine a modification of the real business cycle model in which the possibility of indeterminacy of equilibria arises. In other words, agents' self-fulfilling expectations can serve as a...