Austerity and the Rise of the Nazi Party Galofré-Vilà, Gregori; Meissner, Christopher M.; McKee, Martin ...
The Journal of economic history,
03/2021, Letnik:
81, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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We study the link between fiscal austerity and Nazi electoral success. Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 show that areas more ...affected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi Party. We also find that the localities with relatively high austerity experienced relatively high suffering (measured by mortality rates) and these areas’ electorates were more likely to vote for the Nazi Party. Our findings are robust to a range of specifications including an instrumental variable strategy and a border-pair policy discontinuity design.
The banking legislation of the 1930s took very little time to pass, was unusually comprehensive, and unusually responsive to public opinion. Ironically, the primary motivations for the main bank ...regulatory reforms in the 1930s (Regulation Q, the separation of investment banking from commercial banking, and the creation of federal deposit insurance) were to preserve and enhance two of the most disastrous policies that contributed to the severity and depth of the Great Depression—unit banking and the real bills doctrine. Other regulatory changes, affecting the allocation of power between the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the Treasury, were intended to reduce the independence of the Fed, while giving the opposite impression. Banking reforms in the 1930s had significant negative consequences for the future of US banking, and took a long time to disappear. The overarching lesson is that the aftermath of crises are moments of high risk in public policy.
Contrary to some accounts, the Hayek-Robbins ("Austrian") theory of the business cycle did not prescribe a monetary policy of "liquidationism" in the sense of passive indifference to sharp deflation ...during the early years of the Great Depression. There is no evidence that Hayek or Robbins influenced any "liquidationist" in the Hoover administration or the Federal Reserve System. Federal Reserve policy during the Great Depression was instead influenced by the real bills doctrine, which (despite some apparent similarities) was diametrically opposed in key respects to Hayek's norms for central bank policy.
Using a newly created microeconomic archive of US imports at the tariff line level for 1930–1933, we construct industry-level tariff wedges incorporating the input–output structure of US economy and ...the heterogeneous role of imports across sectors of the economy. We use these wedges to show that the average tariff rate of 46% in 1933 substantially understated the true impact of the Smoot–Hawley (SH) tariff structure, which we estimate to be equivalent to a uniform tariff rate of 70%. We use these wedges to calculate the impact of the Smoot–Hawley tariffs on total factor productivity and welfare. In our benchmark parameterization, we find that tariff protection reduced TFP by 1.2% relative to free trade prior to the Smoot–Hawley legislation. TFP fell by an additional 0.5% between 1930 and 1933 due to Smoot–Hawley. We also conduct counterfactual policy exercises and examine the sensitivity of our results to changes in the elasticity of substitution and the import share. A doubling of the substitution elasticities yields a TFP decline of almost 5% relative to free trade, with an additional reduction due to SH of 0.4%.
The Great Depression in the United States produced a great outpouring of local currencies as responses to various aspects of the economic crisis. This article describes the basic types of scrip in ...use, assesses their legality and theoretical justification, and ventures some generalizations as to what sorts of scrip worked best. It argues that the widespread use of local scrip was not motivated by any systematic analysis of the shortcomings of the national economy, or of its monetary system. Rather, the scrip movement represented eclectic responses to specific economic problems created by the Depression.
The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an ...alternative assessment of synchronous sound's impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies' traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles O'Brien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technology's diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound's intelligibility within a film's story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sound's fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.
Weaknesses within the check-clearing system played a hitherto unrecognized role in the banking crises of the Great Depression. Correspondent check-clearing networks were vulnerable to counter-party ...cascades. Accounting conventions that overstated reserves available to corresponding institutions may have exacerbated the situation. The initial banking panic began when a correspondent network centered in Nashville collapsed, forcing over 100 institutions to suspend operations. As the contraction continued, additional correspondent systems imploded. The vulnerability of correspondent networks is one reason that banks that cleared via correspondents failed at higher rates than other institutions during the Great Depression.
Bank distress peaked in New York City, at the center of the United States money market, in July and August 1931, when the banking crisis peaked in Germany and before Britain abandoned the gold ...standard. This article tests competing theories about the causes of New York's banking crisis. The cause appears to have been intensified regulatory scrutiny, which was a delayed reaction to the failure of the Bank of United States, rather than the exposure of money center banks to events overseas.
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