Download It’s Crunch Time, Ben: The Banking Crisis of 2008 and 1931

Projects
EH 447, 2008/9
Week 5-2
Albrecht Ritschl
What I want you to do
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Find and work with data
Get ideas from literature
Perform a few data transformations
Provide a descriptive account of the
episode in question, based on your data
analysis
Common data sources
 Angus Maddison on GDP per capita
(at Univ. of Groningen website)
 NBER macrohistory database for interewar
period (mostly US, some UK, F)
 U.S. Historical Statistics, latest edition
 League of Nations data
(at Northwestern Univ. website)
 Postwar statistics: OECD and many national
statistical offices
Identifying Great Depressions
 For your home country (if possible)
 Get data (also background readings!)
 Replicate graphs in Ritschl/Straumann
(2008), using 2% rule
 Apply first differences of logarithms as
an alternative (can be done in Excel)
 Report findings on a few slides
China
 Do U find growth spurt since 1980s?
 Try to find data on capital stock,
calculate TFP growth for subperiods
 Check out literature: Alwyn Young,
several papers
(South-)East Asia and WW2
 Try to find GDP per capita data, apply
2% rule since 1913 wherever possible.
 Provide your own interpretation for
1950s
Western Europe
 Find data from your preferred country
and perform 2% exercise (for Britain,
less – why?)
 Provide your own interpretation of
Golden Age of 1950s
Latin America
1. Same as before. Be good and do this
for more than one country
2. Phoenix miracles:
1. Argentina
2. Mexico
Africa
(this is the most interesting of all.. )
Same as before. Perform 2 % exercise.
 Aggregate up a few countries, put
together in appropriate groups
Monetary policy
 Go to NBER macrohistory database,
compute M1 and M2 for interwar
period, plot components, growth rates
 Combine with suitable output and price
data
 Run VARs in Eviews (I’ll help a bit)
Monetary policy
 The same can be done for a few other
countries where data are good
 Canada (?)
 Norway, Sweden, Netherlands (?)
 France
 Germany
Forecasting the G-D
 Take series of machine orders, housing
starts from NBER database
 Combine with output
 Run VAR to Sept 1929 and predict
output out of sample
 Same with Germany (other countries?)
Investment demand
 Find data on components of investment
(machine orders, housing starts,
commercial construction) and relate to
interest rate
 (Run VARs, same as in Bernanke 1983)
Financial markets
 Collect and plot stock market indices for
major countries in interwar period
 Metrics project: run VAR between stock
market, CPI and output and try to
predict out of sample