IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/126517.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Devaluation, exports, and recovery from the Great Depression

Author

Listed:
  • Lennard, Jason
  • Paker, Meredith

Abstract

This paper evaluates how a major policy shift – the suspension of the gold standard in September 1931 – affected employment outcomes in interwar Britain. We use a new high-frequency industry-level dataset and difference-in-differences techniques to isolate the impact of devaluation on exporters. At the micro level, the break from gold reduced the unemployment rate by 2.7 percentage points for export-intensive industries relative to non-export industries. At the aggregate level, this effect stimulated the labor market, the fiscal outlook, and economic growth. Devaluation was therefore an important initial spark of recovery from the depths of the Great Depression.

Suggested Citation

  • Lennard, Jason & Paker, Meredith, 2024. "Devaluation, exports, and recovery from the Great Depression," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 126517, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:126517
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126517/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    exports; gold standard; interwar Britain; unemployment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
    • N14 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:126517. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.