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Keywords:great depression OR Great depression OR Great Depression 

Working Paper
Trade, Relative Prices, and the Canadian Great Depression

Canadian GNP per capita fell by roughly a third between 1928 and 1933. Although the decline and the slow recovery of GNP resemble the American Great Depression, trade was more important in Canada, as exports and imports each accounted for roughly a quarter of Canadian GNP in 1928. The fall in the trade share of GNP of roughly 30 percent between 1928 and 1933 was accompanied by a decline of over 20 percent in the relative prices of exports and imports relative to nontraded goods. We develop a three-sector small open economy model, where wages in the nontraded and import competing sectors ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1606

Working Paper
Sovereign Default in the US

In the absence of a judicial mechanism to reduce the debt burden of a sovereign member of our Union, the resolution process can be quick but perhaps too indifferent to the health, safety, and welfare of the affected residents. In this paper, I use evidence from the Arkansas state archives to provide a description of the events surrounding the default of the state in 1933. I examine the evolution of the negotiations, the outcomes, and the role of fiscal policy.
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1609

Working Paper
Recovery of 1933

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted government debt from a tax-backed claim to gold to a claim to dollars, opening the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. Roosevelt followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary deficits until the price level rose and economic activity recovered. Theory suggests that government spending multipliers can be substantially larger when fiscal expansions are unbacked than when they are tax-backed. VAR estimates using data on "emergency" unbacked spending and "ordinary" backed spending confirm this ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-032r1

Report
Information Management in Times of Crisis

How does information management and control affect bank stability? Following a national bank holiday in 1933, New York state bank regulators suspended the publication of balance sheets of state-charter banks for two years, whereas the national-charter bank regulator did not. We use this divergence in policies to examine how the suspension of bank-specific information affected depositors. We find that state-charter banks experienced significantly less deposit outflows than national-charter banks in 1933. However, the behavior of bank deposits across both types of banks converged in 1934 after ...
Staff Reports , Paper 907

Working Paper
Recovery of 1933

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted government debt from a tax-backed claim to gold to a claim to dollars, opening the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. Roosevelt followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary deficits until the price level rose and economic activity recovered. Theory suggests that government spending multipliers can be substantially larger when fiscal expansions are unbacked than when they are tax-backed. VAR estimates using data on "emergency" unbacked spending and "ordinary" backed spending confirm this ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-032

Working Paper
Export-Led Decay: The Trade Channel in the Gold Standard Era

Flexible exchange rates can facilitate price adjustments that buffer macroeconomic shocks. We test this hypothesis using adjustments to the gold standard during the Great Depression. Using prices at the goods level, we estimate exchange rate pass-through. Using novel monthly data on city-level economic activity, combined with employment composition and sectoral export data, we show that American exporting cities were significantly affected by changes in bilateral exchange rates. With those results we calibrate a general equilibrium model to obtain aggregate effects from cross-sectional ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-11r

Working Paper
Worker and Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Classified Advertisements

We present new monthly U.S. city-level and national measures of worker and firm search from 1900 to 1938, derived from scanned images of U.S. newspapers. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically use the “situations-wanted” advertisements placed by job seekers. We document fresh insights into early 20th-century labor market dynamics: (1) worker and firm search efforts are procyclical; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior and labor search intensity; (3) the Beveridge curve is stable over the last 125 years, with similar shifts following the 1918 flu and Covid-19 ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2025-13

Journal Article
Ben Bernanke: Solving a Crisis, Changing the Fed

Ben Bernanke’s contributions to economic thinking have been vast, from his extensive study of the Great Depression to groundbreaking research on the interplay of finance and the macroeconomy and the usefulness of unconventional monetary policy tools. His research helped guide his tenure as Federal Reserve Chair and his role in putting the U.S. economy on a path to the longest expansion in its history. Through that role, he also built a better and more transparent Fed for the future. The following remarks are adapted from a presentation by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco president, ...
FRBSF Economic Letter , Volume 2025 , Issue 02 , Pages 7

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