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Finance, farms, and the Fed's early years

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  • 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
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    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23511.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    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, July.
    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.
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    Cited by:

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    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

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