Over the past century the long-run growth of six economies shows a strong association between investment in machinery and economic growth that holds both within and across nations and periods. A similar strong association holds for the post-world War II period for a broader cross section of...

During the 1929-33 slide into the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve took almost no steps to keep the money supply or the price level stable. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted - disastrously - as if the gathering Great Depression could not be avoided, and was best endured. Such a...

The pre-WWI period saw the heyday of "financial capitalism" in the United States: the concentration of securities issues in the hands of a few investment bankers which had substantial representation on corporate boards of directors. This form of organization had costs: it created a conflict of...

Economists believe that because technology is a public good national productivity levels should "converge." William Baumol(1986) argues that the imprint of convergence can be seen over the past century if one focuses attention on relatively rich nations that had the social capability to take...

As measured by the pace of city growth in western Europe from 1000 to 1800. absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without...

This paper uses long-run real price and dividends series to investigate for the German stock market the questions asked of the U.S. market by Shiller (1989). It tries to determine in what periods and to what degree the German stock market has also possessed excess volatility' in the past...

Large long-run swings in the United States stock market over the past century correspond to swings in estimates of fundamental values calculated by using a long moving average of past dividend growth to forecast future growth rates. Such a procedure would have been reasonable if investors were...

The post-World War II reconstruction of Western Europe was one of the greatest economic policy and foreign policy successes of this century. "Folk wisdom" assigns a major role in successful reconstruction to the Marshall Plan: the program that transferred some $13 billion to Europe in the years...

Closed-end mutual funds provide one of the few cases in which economists can observe "fundamental" values directly, and compare them to market values: the fundamental value of a closed-end fund is simply the net asset value of its portfolio. We use the difference between prices and asset values...

The major bull and bear markets of this century have suggested to many that large decade-to-decade stock market swings reflect irrational "fads and fashions" that periodically sweep investors. We argue instead that investors have perceived significant shifts in the long-run mean rate of future...