Has the great depression returned?

The Great Depression

The Great Depression

This paper is about the explanation of the Great Depression given in Keynes’ General Theory. There are two key ideas in this book that set it apart from pre-Keynesian economics: The first is that there is something distinctive about the labor market that makes the marginal disutility of labor different in general from the real wage. The second is that aggregate economic activity is determined b...

Capital Taxation During the U.S. Great Depression

Previous studies of the U.S. Great Depression find that increased government spending and taxation contributed little to either the dramatic downturn or the slow recovery. These studies include only one type of capital taxation: a business profits tax. The contribution is much greater when the analysis includes other types of capital taxes. A general equilibrium model extended to include taxes ...

The Finnish Great Depression: from Russia

Why did Finland experience in 1991-93 the deepest recession observed in an industrialized country since the 1930s? Using a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor frictions, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet-Finnish trade was a major contributor to the contraction. Finland’s experience mirrors that of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, which suffered similar deep recessions...

What - or who - started the great depression?

Herbert Hoover. I develop a theory of labor market failure for the Depression based on Hoover’s industrial labor program that provided industry with protection from unions in return for keeping nominal wages fixed. I find that the theory accounts for much of the depth of the Depression and for the asymmetry of the depression across sectors. The theory also can reconcile why deflation/low nomina...