There is a large body of literature analyzing the onset of the Great Depression or the factors influencing economic recovery in the 1930s, especially the New Deal. The role of income inequality before and during the Great Depression, however, has almost never been discussed thoroughly. This...

In 1931, a financial crisis began in Austria, spread to Germany, forced Britain to abandon the gold standard, crossed the Atlantic, and afflicted financial institutions in the United States. This article describes how banks in New York City, the central money market of the United States, reacted...

This paper estimates a nonlinear Threshold-VAR to investigate if a Keynesian liquidity trap due to a speculative motive was in place in the U.S. Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. We find clear evidence in favor of a breakdown of the liquidity effect after an unexpected increase in...

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers' acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass'...

This paper analyses several severe financial crises observed in the history of capitalism which led to a longer period of stagnation or low growth. Comparative case studies of the Great Depression, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s and 2000s are...

We attempt to explain the severe 1920-21 recession, the roaring 1920s boom, and the slide into the Great Depression after 1929 in a unified framework. The model combines monopolistic product market competition with search frictions in the labor market, allowing for both individual and collective...

Germany's Great Depression of the early 1930s started in 1929 with a sudden stop in the current account. It ended after a foreign debt default that unfolded in several stages from 1931 to 1933. This chapter reviews Germany's macroeconomic history between the gold-based stabilisation of 1924 and...

This paper puts John Maynard Keynes’ "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" into its historical context, both in terms of economic history and in terms of the history of economics. It discusses the post-World War I period as background to the General Theory, looks at the...

This paper analyzes how risk premiums altered the use of commercial paper relative to bank loans during the recent financial crisis. Consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature on how surges in risk premiums can induce plunges in under-collateralized credit or credit funded with...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...