We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century - the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century - the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century – the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

This paper recasts Temin's (1976) question of whether monetary forces caused the Great Depression in a modern time series framework. We analyze money-income causalities and predict U.S. output in a recursive Bayesian framework, allowing for information updating and time-varying coefficients. The...

When comparing the New Economy and the time before the Great Depression there are two obvious analogies. In the 1920s as in the 1990s there was an investment boom triggered through the use of new technologies and rapid technological development. In the 1920s, these were the electricity and the...

The extreme levels of stock price volatility found during the Great Depression have often been attributed to political uncertainty. This Paper performs an explicit test of the Merton/Schwert hypothesis that doubts about the survival of the capitalist system were partly responsible. It does so by...

In their 1993 book, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway contend that US unemployment during the twentieth century can be largely explained by movements in the "adjusted real wage rate", that is, the real hourly wage rate divided by labor productivity. In particular, the authors suggest that...

Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

The prominent role of monetary policy in the U.S. interwar depression has been conventional wisdom since Friedman and Schwartz [1963]. This paper presents evidence on both the surprise and the systematic components of monetary policy between 1929 and 1933. Doubts surrounding GDP estimates for...

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...