If a central bank adopted a zero inflation target, it would, in practice, occasionally deviate up and down from that rate, and the economy would experience episodes of mild inflation and deflation. Is deflation-a decrease in the level of prices-a cause for concern? Deflation can cause output to...

Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary conomics - the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...

The authors seek to measure the potential benefit of reducing the likelihood of economic crises (defined as Depression-style collapses of economic activity). Based on the observed frequency of Depression-like events, they estimate this likelihood to be approximately one in every 83 years for the...

State per capita incomes became more disperse during the contraction phase of the Great Depression, and less disperse during the recovery phase. We investigate the effects of spatial dependence, industrial composition, bank failures and fiscal policies on state income growth during each phase....

This study assesses five common explanations for the large decline in U.S. total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Depression: changes in capacity utilization, factor input quality, and production composition; labor hoarding; and increasing returns to scale. The study finds that these...