Recent analysis focuses on the gold standard as a channel for the transmission of the Great Depression. Trade linkages, which loom large in the recent literature, play a smaller role. Both the gold standard and trade were associated with higher co-movement at the bilateral level during the...

A large body of cross-country empirical evidence identifies monetary policy and trade integration as key determinants of business cycle co-movement. Partially consistent with this, many argue that the re-emergence of the gold standard allowed for the global transmission of a deflationary shock...

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...

Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist: low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; high barriers to trade. We first argue that...

Bimetallism disappeared as a monetary regime in the 1870s. Flandreau (1996) clearly demonstrates that French bimetallism would have been able to withstand the German de-monetization of silver. Could it have withstood if many other countries in the world moved to the gold standard following in...