What Ended the Great Depression?

What ended the great depression ? Reevaluating the role of fiscal policy

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...

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...

What makes great boards great.

In the wake of meltdowns at WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron, enormous attention has been focused on the companies' boards. It seems inconceivable that business disasters of such magnitude could happen without gross or even criminal negligence on the part of board members. And yet a close examination of those boards reveals no broad pattern of incompetence or corruption. In fact, they followed most of...