We study the role of political uncertainty on economic outcomes using the case of Huey Long's tenure as governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression. We construct two well-established measures of uncertainty specifically for Louisiana using primary sources: stock price volatility and...

Stock market volatility was extremely high during the Great Depression relative to any other period in American history. At the same time, large negative and positive discontinuous jumps in stock returns can be detected using the Barndor-Nielsen and Shephard (2004) test for jumps in financial...

Long-term unemployment was a problem both during the Great Depression and today. As employers view the long-term unemployed as lower-quality employees, this reduces their prospects for reemployment long after the end of a recession, a phenomenon which has been previously described as "hysteresis...