Using new data on market-based transactions we construct real estate price indexes for Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. During the 1920s prices reached their highest level in the third quarter of 1929 before falling by 67 percent at the end of 1932 and hovering around that value for most of the...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

This paper constructs the first repeat sales house price index in United States history before 1950, using data from Baltimore. It shows that house prices fell more during the 1890s and 1930s than existing data indicate. As a result, while previous data suggest most borrowers should have been...

An oversupply of housing, as a result of a building boom after the turn of the century, is commonly cited as a key cause of the Great Recession and the slow recovery from that recession. Using both national data and data for individual metropolitan areas, such as housing permits, residential...

We apply a dynamic general equilibrium model to the period of the Great Depression. In particular, we examine a modification of the real business cycle model in which the possibility of indeterminacy of equilibria arises. In other words, agents' self-fulfilling expectations can serve as a...

This paper gives new evidence for the importance of bank suspensions during the Great Depression. I establish that more financially dependent manufacturing industries exhibited steeper declines in output relative to peers. This differential is largest in states that were most affected by banking...

The monetary authority's choice of operating procedure has significant implications for the role of monetary aggregates and interest rate policy on the business cycle. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that the type of endogenous monetary regime, together with the interaction...

Government intervention during the banking holiday of March 1933 resolved the uncertainty usually created by bank suspensions. Including banking holiday suspensions in growth regressions therefore biases downwards the estimates of the real effects of bank suspensions. In this paper, I propose a...

This paper studies evolving macroeconomic consequences of adverse credit spread shocks for the US economy over the past century. The key objective is to characterize and quantify how the credit transmission mechanism has changed in shaping the macroeconomy during major macroeconomic episodes. I...

This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business...