This paper addresses a general theoretical question - the appropriate specification of the transactions demand for money - as well as a particular historical question: what triggered the Great Depression? Theoretically, fluctuations in the volume and value of asset exchanges in secondary asset...

Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated...

There is now an emerging consensus that over the course of U.S. economic history, multifactor productivity grew fastest over a broad plateau between 1905 and 1966, and within that period, in the two decades following 1929. This paper argues that the bulk of the achieved productivity levels in...

A common procedure in productivity research is to use estimates of the stocks of physical capital as proxies for service flows. A number of authors propose cyclical adjustments for capital input which, if large enough, will eliminate findings of procyclicality in the behavior of TFP. This paper...

A consideration of TFP growth in the United States during the golden age (1948-73) raises two related questions: on the one hand why was it so strong and on the other hand, why were TFP growth rates lower than they were during the Depression years (1929-41)? A continuing downward trend in TFP...

Thomas Schelling was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee as a pioneer in the application of game theory and rational choice analysis to problems of politics and international relations. But although he makes frequent references in his writings to this approach, his main explorations and...

Institutions affect economic outcomes, but variation in them cannot be directly linked to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or technological availabilities. Game theoretic approaches, based as they typically are on foraging only assumptions, don't provide an adequate foundation...

In spite of its checkered intellectual history, and in spite of the myriad proposals of alternative models that claim both to account for the range of human behavior and to dispense with the need for selection above the organism level, a multilevel selection framework allowing for biological as...