The Great Depression of the 1930s

Nicholas Crafts is Professor of Economic History at the University of Warwick and Director of the ESRC Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy Research Centre (CAGE). He has held positions at the London School of Economics, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a consultant to many organizations including HM Treasury, IMF, and the World Bank. Peter Fearon is Emeritus Professor of Modern Economic History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on the great depression with a particular emphasis on the US economy and the New Deal. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the University of Kansas, and La Trobe University.

• 1. Depression and Recovery in the 1930s: An Overview ; 2. The 1930s: Understanding the Lessons ; 3. Europe's Great Depression: coordination failure after the First World War ; 4. Reparations, Deficits, and Debt Default: The Great Depression in Germany ; 5. Disintegration of the International Economy between the Wars ; 6. The Political Lessons of Depression-era Banking Reform ; 7. The Banking Panics in the United States in the 1930s: Some Lessons for Today ; 8. Can Contractionary Fiscal Policy be Expansionary? Consolidation, Sustainability, and Fiscal Policy Impact in Britain in the 1930s ; 9. US Monetary and Fiscal Policy in the 1930s ; 10. What was New about the New Deal? ; 11. Labour Markets in the Interwar Period and Economic Recovery in the UK and the USA ; 12. Economic Growth and Recovery in the United States: 1919-1941 ; 13. Blood and Treasure: Exiting the Great Depression and Lessons for Today ; 14. Fetters of Gold and Paper

This is not an ordinary edited volume. Every paper seems to have been specially written for it and fits the title. Each views an aspect of the interwar era in light of theoretical and policy issues related to our own post-2008 depression, and draws explicit lessons... the volume includes many of the best economic historians working on the interwar era, scholars worth reading... all of the papers are admirably up to date on the current macroeconomics literature, including recent attempts to accounts for events of the 1930s in terms of real business cycle and New Keynesian models. Monetary policy at the zero bound, hysteresis in the natural rate of unemployment, recovery from a financial crisis and regulatory reforms, the euro and the gold standard? These and many other topics are well-covered.