Monday, September 23, 2013

Central Banks and the Interwar Gold Standard

I just uploaded my paper to SSRN:

In the last several decades David Glasner, Douglas Irwin, Ronald Batchelder, and Scott Sumner have revived Hawtrey and Cassel’s explanation of the Great Depression. According to them, the intensity of the Great Depression can be explained by a dramatic increase in demand for gold by central banks, principally in the United States and France, which forced down prices internationally. This paper expands their analysis with a model to test the impact of changes in aggregate gold reserves on the gold price level throughout much of the interwar era.