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Good versus Bad Deflation: Lessons from the Gold Standard Era

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Michael D. Bordo
John Landon Lane
Angela Redish

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Abstract

Deflation has had a bad rap, largely based on the experience of the 1930's when deflation was synonymous with depression. Recent experience with declining prices in Japan and China together with the concern over deflation in Europe and the United States has led to renewed attention to the topic of deflation. In this paper we focus our attention on the deflation experience of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the late nineteenth century during a period characterized by low deflation, rapid productivity growth, positive output growth, and where many nations had a credible nominal anchor based on gold: circumstances which have resonance with the world of today. We identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, and money supply shocks using a structural panel vector autoregression. We then use historical decompositions to investigate the impact that these structural shocks had on output and prices. Our findings are that the deflation of the late nineteenth century reflected both positive aggregate supply shocks and negative money supply shocks. However, the negative money supply shocks had little effect on output. This we posit is because the aggregate supply curve was very steep in the short run during this period. This contrasts greatly with the deflation experience during the Great Depression. Thus our empirical evidence suggests that deflation in the nineteenth century was primarily good.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 10329.

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Date of creation: Feb 2004
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10329

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E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
N20 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - General, International, or Comparative

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  1. Timothy J. Kehoe & Edward C. Prescott, 2002. "Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 5(1), pages 1-18, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Smith, Ron, 1995. "Estimating long-run relationships from dynamic heterogeneous panels," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 79-113, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Barro, Robert J, 1979. "Money and the Price Level under the Gold Standard," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 89(353), pages 13-33, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. Bernanke, Ben S, 1983. "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in Propagation of the Great Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(3), pages 257-76, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Chris Faulkner-MacDonagh & Taimur Baig & Jörg Decressin & Tarhan Feyzioglu & Manmohan S. Kumar, 2003. "Deflation: Determinants, Risks, and Policy Options," IMF Occasional Papers 221, International Monetary Fund.
  6. U. Michael Bergman & Michael D. Bordo & Lars Jonung, 1998. "Historical evidence on business cycles: the international experience," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Jun, pages 65-119. [Downloadable!]
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  7. Chappell, David & Dowd, Kevin, 1997. "A Simple Model of the Gold Standard," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 29(1), pages 94-105, February.
  8. Holtz-Eakin, Douglas & Newey, Whitney & Rosen, Harvey S, 1988. "Estimating Vector Autoregressions with Panel Data," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(6), pages 1371-95, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Michael D. Bordo & Christopher J. Erceg & Charles L. Evans, 2000. "Money, Sticky Wages, and the Great Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1447-1463, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Blanchard, Olivier Jean & Quah, Danny, 1989. "The Dynamic Effects of Aggregate Demand and Supply Disturbances," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(4), pages 655-73, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Athanasios Orphanides, 2001. "Monetary policy rules, macroeconomic stability and inflation: a view from the trenches," Working Paper Series 115, European Central Bank. [Downloadable!]
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  12. Michael D. Bordo, 1981. "The classical gold standard: some lessons for today," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue May, pages 2-17. [Downloadable!]
  13. Bordo, Michael David & Ellson, Richard Wayne, 1985. "A model of the classical gold standard with depletion," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 109-120, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  1. John Landon-Lane & Kim Oosterlinck, 2005. "Hope springs eternal… French bondholders and the Soviet Repudiation (1915-1919)," Departmental Working Papers 200513, Rutgers University, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  2. Andrew Atkeson & Patrick J. Kehoe, 2004. "Deflation and depression: is there an empirical link?," Staff Report 331, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. [Downloadable!]
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  3. William T. Gavin & Athena T. Theodorou, 2004. "A common model approach to macroeconomics: using panel data to reduce sampling error," Working Papers 2003-045, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
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  4. Gang Gong & Justin Yifu Lin, 2005. "Deflationary Expansion: an Overshooting Perspective to the Recent Business Cycle in China," Macroeconomics Working Papers 658, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. [Downloadable!]
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