The Great Depression of the early twentieth century is widely considered the most devastating economic downturn that the developed world has ever seen. Industrial output was severely affected across Europe, and in Germany alone, it fell to just 58 percent of its pre-Depression level by 1932. Other Central European countries, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, also saw their output fall to just sixty percent of their pre-Depression levels, while output in Western and Northern Europe declined by much less. By 1937/8, almost a decade after the Wall Street Crash, most of these countries saw their industrial output increase above its pre-Depression level. Germany saw its output increase to 132 percent of its 1928 output, as it emerged as Europe's strongest economy shortly before the beginning of the Second World War.

Graph and download economic data for Unemployment Rate for United States (M0892AUSM156SNBR) from Apr 1929 to Jun 1942 about unemployment, rate, and USA.

Code and data to replicate the results in the article "Labor Market Effects of Workweek Restrictions: Evidence from the Great Depression".

The estimated number of banks and thrifts in the United States fell from around ****** in 1920 to ****** in 1929, when the onset of the Great Depression would then see it fall further, below ****** in 1933. This marks a cumulative decline of over ****** banks and thrifts, which is equal to a drop of more than ** percent in 13 years. Tumultuous Twenties Despite the economic prosperity associated with the Roarin' 1920s in the U.S., it was a tumultuous decade in financial terms, with more separate recessions than any other decade. However, the ***** was also privy to frivolous lending policies among many banks, which saw the banking sector collapse in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Many banks failed as the Great Depression and unemployment spread across the country, and customers or businesses could not afford to repay their loans. It was only after this financial crisis where the federal government began keeping more stringent and accurate records on its banking sector, therefore precise figures and the reasons behind these bank failures are not always clear. Franklin D. Roosevelt Just two days after assuming office in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt drastically declared a bank holiday, and all banks in the country were closed from ******* until ********. This break allowed Congress to pass the Emergency Banking Act on *******, which saw the Federal Reserve provide deposit insurance for all reopened banks thereafter. Through his first fireside chat, Roosevelt then encouraged Americans to re-deposit their money in the banks again, which successfully restored much of the public's faith in the banking system - it is estimated that over half of the cash withdrawn during the Great Depression was then returned to the banks by ********.

We study how firms allocate resources across their constituent establishments in response to local economic shocks in the context of the Great Depression. Using establishment-level data from the Census of Manufactures, we find that establishmentsin multi-plant firms are affected by local shocks in the regions in which the other establishments comprising the firm are located. In particular, establishment employment is positively affected by positive shocks to the local supply of credit to other establishments that make up the firm. Our results show the important role of firms in the geographic propagation of local economic shocks

Cohen, Jon, Hachem, Kinda, and Richardson, Gary, (2021) “Relationship Lending and the Great Depression.” Review of Economics and Statistics 103:3, 505–520.

Between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s, the Soviet Union saw the largest growth in its gross domestic product, growing by more than 70 percent between 1929 and 1937/8. The Great Depression began in 1929 in the United States, following the stock market crash in late October. The inter-connectedness of the global economy, particularly between North America and Europe, then came to the fore as the collapse of the U.S. economy exposed the instabilities of other industrialized countries. In contrast, the economic isolation of the Soviet Union and its detachment from the capitalist system meant that it was relatively shielded from these events. 1929-1932 The Soviet Union was one of just three countries listed that experienced GDP growth during the first three years of the Great Depression, with Bulgaria and Denmark being the other two. Bulgaria experienced the largest GDP growth over these three years, increasing by 27 percent, although it was also the only country to experience a decline in growth over the second period. The majority of other European countries saw their GDP growth fall in the depression's early years. However, none experienced the same level of decline as the United States, which dropped by 28 percent. 1932-1938 In the remaining years before the Second World War, all of the listed countries saw their GDP grow significantly, particularly Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Coincidentally, these were the three most powerful nations during the Second World War. This recovery was primarily driven by industrialization, and, again, the U.S., USSR, and Germany all experienced the highest level of industrial growth between 1932 and 1938.

From March to July 1933, US industrial production rose 57 percent. We show that an important source of recovery was the effect of dollar devaluation on farm prices, incomes, and consumption. Devaluation immediately raised traded crop prices, and auto sales grew more rapidly in states and counties most exposed to these price increases. The response was amplified in counties with more severe farm debt burdens. For plausible assumptions about farmers' relative MPC, the incidence of higher farm prices, and the aggregate multiplier, this redistribution to farmers accounted for a substantial portion of spring 1933 growth. This farm channel thus provides an example of how the distributional consequences of macroeconomic policies can have large aggregate effects. That recovery in 1933 benefited from redistribution to farmers suggests an important limitation to the use of 1933 as a guide to the effects of monetary regime changes in other circumstances.

Data supporting the chapter "The Great Depression in Canada and the United States: A Neoclassical Perspective."

During the Great Depression in the United States in 1930s, the federal government's share of relief spending in major cities changed drastically following the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The previous administration of President Herbert Hoover oversaw the beginning of the depression in 1930, however federal spending on relief was virtually non-existent until his final year in office, and the share of overall relief spending was just two percent in 1932.

With Roosevelt's New Deal, the U.S. government established various agencies and programs that provided relief for its citizens. This included the introduction of social security systems, as well as the creation of public works programs which created government jobs in areas such as construction and infrastructure. In later years, economic recovery also allowed for the expansion of these programs into areas such as disability benefits, and per capita relief spending more than doubled from 1933 to 1936.

In the article we analyze the financial behavior of Dutch households during the Great Depression with household level data on income and expenditure from contemporary budget surveys. The data we use consists of published budget surveys from the Netherlands, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht (1932-1937). The data are available on paper but we have created Excel files that contain a large part but not all of the data published on paper in the 1930s. We have exported the Excel Files in CSV format to R, which we then used to create the tables in our paper, to execute a regression analysis, and to perform additional analyses for the paper’s appendix.

We study banking panics in the Great Depression using a newly digitized dataset on panic intensity, regional monetary aggregates and economic activity.

Collection and organization of monthly historical economic data for interwar Italy, partly used within the doctoral thesis "Transmission Mechanisms and Persistence of the Great Depression in Italy". Dataset includes high frequency time series on labor market outcomes, trade barriers, public finances, financial variables.

Replication Files for Bank Lending and Deposit Crunches during the Great DepressionBank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States.Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrewfunds en masse during panics. This panic-induced decline in lending explains aboutone-third of the reduction in aggregate commercial bank lending between 1929 and1932, more than twice as much as attributed to the failure of banks.

Boone, C. D. A., and Wilse-Samson, L. (2023). “Structural Change and Internal Labor Migration: Evidence from the Great Depression.” Review of Economics and Statistics 105:4, 962–981.

ABSTRACT By contrasting the Great Depression and the Coronacrisis, we demonstrate that narrative economics (Shiller, 2017) is key in the analysis of economic fluctuations. We note the importance of the populist narrative to understand the economic and health outcomes of the Coronacrisis in Mexico and highlight the role of the predominance of different economic paradigms in economic policy decision-making. We suggest that, just as in 1929, by following orthodox primary fiscal balance sheet policies at the cost of contracting government investment, the Mexican economy will undergo a long and painful recovery process compared to its global peers.

This essay assesses whether network linkages within the banking system amplified the real effects of bank failures during the Great Contraction. In 1929, nearly all interbank deposits held by Federal Reserve member banks belonged to "shadowy" nonmember banks which were outside the regulatory reach of federal regulators. Regional banking panics in the early 1930s drained these interbank deposits from central reserve city banks. Money-center banks in Chicago and New York responded to volatile and declining interbank deposits by changing their asset composition. They reduced their lending to businesses and individuals, and increased their holdings of cash and government bonds.

Data supporting the chapter "The Great Depression in Italy: Trade Restrictions and Real Wage Rigidities."

The Long Depression was, by a large margin, the longest-lasting recession in U.S. history. It began in the U.S. with the Panic of 1873, and lasted for over five years. This depression was the largest in a series of recessions at the turn of the 20th century, which proved to be a period of overall stagnation as the U.S. financial markets failed to keep pace with industrialization and changes in monetary policy. Great Depression The Great Depression, however, is widely considered to have been the most severe recession in U.S. history. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the country's economy collapsed, wages fell and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. It would take almost four years for recovery to begin. Additionally, U.S. expansion and integration in international markets allowed the depression to become a global event, which became a major catalyst in the build up to the Second World War. Decreasing severity When comparing recessions before and after the Great Depression, they have generally become shorter and less frequent over time. Only three recessions in the latter period have lasted more than one year. Additionally, while there were 12 recessions between 1880 and 1920, there were only six recessions between 1980 and 2020. The most severe recession in recent years was the financial crisis of 2007 (known as the Great Recession), where irresponsible lending policies and lack of government regulation allowed for a property bubble to develop and become detached from the economy over time, this eventually became untenable and the bubble burst. Although the causes of both the Great Depression and Great Recession were similar in many aspects, economists have been able to use historical evidence to try and predict, prevent, or limit the impact of future recessions.

This contains the dataset of the 1936 household consumption survey and 1930 census data used in "Fiscal Policy and Economic Recovery: The Case of the 1936 Veterans' Bonus." The underlying household survey data come from ICPSR study 08908. The Census data come from the IPUMS 5% sample from the 1930 Census. The primary data file is urban_lprob.dta. urban_nodups.dta contains a subset of these data for programming convenience. For further documentation, see the paper, and the data and program files posted on the American Economic Review's website.