Projects EH 447, 2008/9 Week 5-2 Albrecht Ritschl

What I want you to do  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