Economic History of Financial Crises

Readings

Textbooks

Bartels, Larry M. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780691136639.

Crafts, Nicholas, and Gianni Toniolo. Economic Growth in Europe since 1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780521499644.

Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F. Katz. The Race between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780674028678. [Preview in Google Books]

[Koo] = Koo, Richard C. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession. Rev. ed. New York, NY: Norton, 2009. ISBN: 9780470824948.

Kindleberger, Charles P., and Jean-Pierre Laffargue. Financial Crises: Theory, History, and Policy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780521243803.

[Morris] = Morris, Charles R. The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2009. ISBN: 9781586486914. [Preview in Google Books]

Taylor, John B. Getting off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780817949716.

[Temin] = Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780262700443. [Preview in Google Books]

Readings by Session

SES #	TOPICS	READINGS
Part I: Growth, wars, and the Great Depression
1	Introduction	Duncan-Jones, Richard. Money and Government in the Roman Empire. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 23-25. ISBN: 9780521648295. Krugman, Paul. “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 6, 2009.
2-3	Crises and industrialization	Ses #2 Minsky, Hyman P. “The Financial-Instability Hypothesis: Capitalist Processes and the Behavior of the Economy.” Chapter 2 in Financial Crises: Theory, History, and Policy. Edited by Charles P. Kindleberger and Jean-Pierre Laffargue. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 13-50. ISBN: 9780521243803. Krugman, Paul. “A Model of Balance-of-Payments Crises.” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 11, no. 3 (August 1979): 311-325. Ses #3 Temin, Peter. “The Anglo-American Business Cycle, 1820-60.” Economic History Review, New Series 27, no. 2 (May 1974): 207-221. Calomiris, Charles W. “Is Deposit Insurance Necessary? A Historical Perspective.” Journal of Economic History 50, no. 2 (June 1990): 283-295. Temin, Peter. “Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Economic History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21, no. 3 (Winter 1991): 371-389.
4-5	Early modern crises	Ses #4 Voth, Hans-Joachim. “South Sea Bubble.” In New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. 2nd ed. Edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. Hampshire, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN: 9780333786765 (set). Temin, Peter, and Hans-Joachim Voth. “Riding the South Sea Bubble.” American Economic Review 94, no. 5 (December 2004): 1654-1668. Ses #5 Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth S. Rogoff. “Banking Crises: An Equal Opportunity Menace.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 14587, December 2008.
6-7	World War I and depression	Ses #6 [Temin] “The Spoils of War: The Cause of the Great Depression,” and “The Midas Touch: The Spread of the Great Depression,” chapters 1 and 2, pp. 1-88. Temin, Peter. “The German Crisis of 1931: Evidence and Tradition.” Cliometrica 2 (2008): 5-17. Ses #7 Temin, Peter. “Real Business Cycle Views of the Great Depression and Recent Events: A Review of Timothy J. Kehoe’s and Edward C. Prescott’s “Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Economic Literature 46, no. 3 (September 2008): 669-684. Temin, Peter. “Corrigendum.” Journal of Economic Literature 47 (March 2009): 3.
8-9	Recovery and World War II	Ses #8 [Temin] “Socialism in Many Countries: The Recovery from the Great Depression,” chapter 3, pp. 89-138. Ses #9 Cole, Harold L., and Lee E. Ohanian. “New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis.” Journal of Political Economy 112, no. 4 (2004): 779-816. Brown, E. Cary. “Fiscal Policy in the ‘Thirties: A Reappraisal.” American Economic Review 46, no. 5 (December 1956): 857-879. Krugman, Paul. “Misguided Monetary Mentalities.” Op-Ed, New York Times, October 12, 2009.
Part II: Post-war stability and crises
10-11	The Golden Age	Ses #10 Eichengreen, Barry. “Institutions and Economic Growth: Europe After World War II.” Chapter 2 in Economic Growth in Europe since 1945. Edited by Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 38-72. ISBN: 9780521499644. Ses #11 Temin, Peter. “The Golden Age of Economic Growth Reconsidered.” European Review of Economic History 6 (April 2002): 3-22. Bartels, Larry M. “The Partisan Political Economy.” Chapter 2 in Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 29-63. ISBN: 9780691136639. [Preview in Google Books]
12-13	Income inequality	Ses #12 Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F. Katz. “The Race between Education and Technology.” Chapter 8 in The Race between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 287-323. ISBN: 9780674028678. [Preview in Google Books] Ses #13 Levy, Frank, and Peter Temin. “Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America.” In “Festschrift for Gavin Wright.” Edited by Paul Rhode, Joshua Rosenbloom, and David Weiman. Also available as National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 13106, May 2007.
14-15	Oil crises of the 1970s	Ses #14 [Morris] “The Death of Liberalism,” and “Wall Street Finds Religion,” chapters 1 and 2, pp. 1-36. Ses #15 Blanchard, Olivier J., and Jordi Gali. “The Macroeconomics of Oil Shocks: Why are the 2000s So Different from the 1970s?” In International Dimensions of Monetary Policy. Edited by Jordi Gali and Mark Gertler. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780226278865. Also available as National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 13368, September 2007.
16-17	Japanese growth and stagnation	Ses #16 [Koo] “Japan’s Recession,” “Characteristics of Balance Sheet Recessions,” and “The Great Depression was a Balance Sheet Recession,” chapters 1 to 3, pp. 1-124. Ses #17 Krugman, Paul, Kathryn M. Dominquez, and Kenneth Rogoff. “It’s Baaack: Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1998, no. 2 (1998): 137-205.
Part III: Recent crises
18-19	Small crises and imbalance	Ses #18 [Morris] “Bubble Land: Practice Runs,” and “A Tsunami of Dollars,” chapters 3 and 5, pp. 37-58, 87-112. Ses #19 Taylor, John B. Getting off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780817949716.
20-21	2008	Ses #20 [Morris] “A Wall of Money,” and “The Great Unwinding,” chapters 4 and 6, pp. 59-86, 113-142. Ses #21 Coval, Joshua, Jakob Jurek, and Erik Stafford. “The Economics of Structured Finance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 3-25. Cecchetti, Stephen G. “Crisis and Responses: The Federal Reserve in the Early Stages of the Financial Crisis.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 51-75.
22-23	2009	Ses #22 [Koo] “Yin and Yang Economic Cycles and the Holy Grail of Macroeconomics,” and “Ongoing Bubbles and Balance Sheet Recessions,” chapters 5 and 7, pp. 157-184, 221-252. Supplementary [Koo] “Monetary, Foreign Exchange, and Fiscal Policy During a Balance Sheet Recession,” and “Pressure of Globalization,” chapters 4 and 6, pp. 125-156, 185-220. Ses #23 Mishkin, Frederick. “Is Monetary Policy Effective during Financial Crises?” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 99, no. 2 (May 2009): 573-577. Johnson, Simon. “The Quiet Coup.” The Atlantic, May 2009.