This paper examines the aftermath of financial crises in advanced countries in the four decades before the Great Recession. We construct a new series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967–2007. The series is based on assessments of the health of countries’ financial...

From the early 1950s to the early 1990s, increases in Social Security benefits in the United States varied widely in size and timing, and were only rarely undertaken in response to short-run macroeconomic developments. This paper uses these benefit increases to investigate the macroeconomic...

This paper examines an important gap in the monetary explanation of the Great Depression: the lack of a well-articulated and documented transmission mechanism of monetary shocks to the real economy. It begins by reviewing the challenge to Friedman and Schwartz's monetary explanation provided by...

This paper shows that the disproportionate impact of tight monetary policy on banks' ability to lend is largely the consequence of Federal Reserve actions aimed at reducing bank loans directly, rather than an inherent feature of the monetary transmission mechanism. We provide two types of...