A list of topics by session is given in the calendar below.
Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Description
This course gives a historical perspective on financial panics. Topics include the growth of the industrial world, the Great Depression and surrounding events, and more recent topics such as the first oil crisis, Japanese stagnation, and conditions following the financial crisis of 2008.
If you want to keep up with financial developments as they happen, take 14.05 Intermediate Applied Microeconomics or read Paul Krugman in The New York Times.
Prerequisites
The prerequisites for this course are 14.01 Principles of Microeconomics and 14.02 Principles of Macroeconomics.
Textbooks
We will read most to all of these books:
Koo, Richard C. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession. Rev. ed. New York, NY: Norton, 2009. ISBN: 9780470824948.
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.
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, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780262700443.
Selected chapters will be chosen from these books:
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.
Kindleberger, Charles P., and Jean-Pierre Laffargue. Financial Crises: Theory, History, and Policy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780521243803.
Course Requirements
You will be expected to complete three problem sets, to read the required material before class, and to participate actively in class discussion.
Grading
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Problem set 1 | 30% |
| Problem set 2 | 30% |
| Problem set 3 | 40% |
Calendar
| SES # | TOPICS | KEY DATES |
|---|---|---|
| Part I: Growth, wars, and the great depression | ||
| 1 | Introduction | |
| 2-3 | Crises and industrialization | |
| 4-5 | Early modern crises | |
| 6-7 | World War I and depression | |
| 8-9 | Recovery and World War II | Problem set 1 due in Ses #9 |
| Part II: Post-war stability and crises | ||
| 10-11 | The Golden Age | |
| 12-13 | Income inequality | |
| 14-15 | Oil crises of the 1970s | |
| 16-17 | Japanese growth and stagnation | Problem set 2 due in Ses #17 |
| Part III: Recent crises | ||
| 18-19 | Small crises and imbalance | |
| 20-21 | 2008 | |
| 22-23 | 2009 | Problem set 3 due in Ses #23 |
