IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/23511.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Finance, farms, and the Fed's early years

Author

Listed:
  • Bruce Carlin
  • William Mann

Abstract

We provide causal evidence that discount rate changes by the Federal Reserve affected economic output in the 1920s. Our identification strategy exploits county-level variation in access to the Fed's discount window, and we implement this strategy with hand-collected data on banking and agriculture in Illinois in the early 20th century. The mechanism for the Fed's effect on agriculture was a bank credit channel, operating independently of any deflationary effect on money supply. Our findings suggest that the Fed deliberately managed transitory shocks during 1920-1921, mitigating debt burdens with which farms would struggle in the years leading to the Great Depression.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruce Carlin & William Mann, 2017. "Finance, farms, and the Fed's early years," NBER Working Papers 23511, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23511
    Note: CF DAE EFG ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23511.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gary B. Gorton & Andrew Metrick, 2013. "The Federal Reserve and Financial Regulation: The First Hundred Years," NBER Working Papers 19292, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Milton Friedman & Anna J. Schwartz, 1963. "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number frie63-1.
    3. Raghuram Rajan & Rodney Ramcharan, 2015. "The Anatomy of a Credit Crisis: The Boom and Bust in Farm Land Prices in the United States in the 1920s," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(4), pages 1439-1477, April.
    4. Romer, Christina D., 1988. "World War I and the postwar depression A reinterpretation based on alternative estimates of GNP," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 91-115, July.
    5. Jith Jayaratne & Philip E. Strahan, 1996. "The Finance-Growth Nexus: Evidence from Bank Branch Deregulation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(3), pages 639-670.
    6. Haelim Anderson & Charles W. Calomiris & Matthew Jaremski & Gary Richardson, 2018. "Liquidity Risk, Bank Networks, and the Value of Joining the Federal Reserve System," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 50(1), pages 173-201, February.
    7. Daniel Kuehn, 2012. "A note on America's 1920--21 depression as an argument for austerity," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 36(1), pages 155-160.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Masami Imai & Tetsuji Okazaki & Michiru Sawada, 2022. "The effects of lender of last resort on financial intermediation during the great depression in Japan [Ginko Hatan gaoyobosu Densenkoka no Bunseki (The analyses of the effect of contagion caused by," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 26(3), pages 448-478.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hilt, Eric & Jaremski, Matthew & Rahn, Wendy, 2022. "When Uncle Sam introduced Main Street to Wall Street: Liberty Bonds and the transformation of American finance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(1), pages 194-216.
    2. Matthew Jaremski & David C. Wheelock, 2020. "Banking on the Boom, Tripped by the Bust: Banks and the World War I Agricultural Price Shock," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(7), pages 1719-1754, October.
    3. Velde, François R., 2022. "What Happened to the U.S. Economy during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? A View Through High-Frequency Data," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(1), pages 284-326, March.
    4. Candelon, Bertrand & Metiu, Norbert & Straetmans, Stefan, 2013. "Disentangling economic recessions and depressions," Discussion Papers 43/2013, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    5. Philip E. Strahan, 2013. "Too Big to Fail: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 5(1), pages 43-61, November.
    6. Calomiris, Charles W. & Flandreau, Marc & Laeven, Luc, 2016. "Political foundations of the lender of last resort: A global historical narrative," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 48-65.
    7. Harold L. Cole & Lee E. Ohanian, 2001. "Re-Examining the Contributions of Money and Banking Shocks to the US Great Depression," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15, pages 183-260, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Jenter, Dirk & Aldunate, Felipe & Korteweg, Arthur & Koudijs, Peter, 2021. "Shareholder Liability and Bank Failure," CEPR Discussion Papers 16309, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Brownlees, Christian & Chabot, Ben & Ghysels, Eric & Kurz, Christopher, 2020. "Back to the future: Backtesting systemic risk measures during historical bank runs and the great depression," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 113(C).
    10. Bordo, Michael & Erceg, Christopher & Levin, Andrew & Michaels, Ryan, 2017. "Policy credibility and alternative approaches to disinflation," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 422-440.
    11. Mark Carlson & David C. Wheelock, 2018. "Did the Founding of the Federal Reserve Affect the Vulnerability of the Interbank System to Contagion Risk?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 50(8), pages 1711-1750, December.
    12. Nanda, Ramana & Nicholas, Tom, 2014. "Did bank distress stifle innovation during the Great Depression?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 273-292.
    13. Gauti B. Eggertsson, 2012. "Was the New Deal Contractionary?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 524-555, February.
    14. McCallum, Bennett T., 1990. "Could a monetary base rule have prevented the great depression?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 3-26, August.
    15. Gauti B. Eggertsson, 2008. "Great Expectations and the End of the Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(4), pages 1476-1516, September.
    16. Liangliang Jiang & Ross Levine & Chen Lin, 2023. "Does Competition Affect Bank Risk?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 55(5), pages 1043-1076, August.
    17. Anthony Orlando, 2018. "Asset Markets, Credit Markets, and Inequality: Distributional Changes in Housing, 1970-2016," ERES eres2018_182, European Real Estate Society (ERES).
    18. João Granja & Christian Leuz & Raghuram G. Rajan, 2022. "Going the Extra Mile: Distant Lending and Credit Cycles," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 77(2), pages 1259-1324, April.
    19. Anbil, Sriya & Vossmeyer, Angela, 2021. "Liquidity from two lending facilities," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 48(C).
    20. Cooper, Russell & Ejarque, Joao, 1995. "Financial intermediation and the Great Depression: a multiple equilibrium interpretation," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 285-323, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B26 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Financial Economics
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:23511. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.