IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/econom/v73y2006i291p393-412.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Investment and Uncertainty: Precipitating the Great Depression in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • DAVID GREASLEY
  • JAKOB B. MADSEN

Abstract

A severe collapse of fixed capital formation distinguished the onset of the Great Depression from other investment downturns between the world wars. Using a model estimated for the years 1890–2000, we show that the expected profitability of capital measured by Tobin's q, and the uncertainty surrounding expected profits indicated by share price volatility, were the chief influences on investment levels, and that heightened share price volatility played the dominant role in the crucial investment collapse in 1930. Investment did not simply follow the downward course of income at the onset of the depression: rather, its slump helped to propel the wider collapse.

Suggested Citation

  • David Greasley & Jakob B. Madsen, 2006. "Investment and Uncertainty: Precipitating the Great Depression in the United States," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 73(291), pages 393-412, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:econom:v:73:y:2006:i:291:p:393-412
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0335.2006.00505.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.2006.00505.x
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Simon Kuznets & Elizabeth Jenks, 1961. "Appendices and Index, "Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing"," NBER Chapters, in: Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing, pages 465-664, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Simon Kuznets & Elizabeth Jenks, 1961. "Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number kuzn61-1, March.
    3. Simon Kuznets & Elizabeth Jenks, 1961. "Introduction to "Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing"," NBER Chapters, in: Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing, pages 3-14, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Leo Grebler & David M. Blank & Louis Winnick, 1956. "Capital Formation in Residential Real Estate: Trends and Prospects," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number greb56-1, March.
    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. Joëts, Marc & Mignon, Valérie & Razafindrabe, Tovonony, 2017. "Does the volatility of commodity prices reflect macroeconomic uncertainty?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 313-326.
    2. Bernard C. Beaudreau, 2017. "Electrification, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Decline in Investment Expenditure in 1931–1932: Testing the Excess-Capacity Hypothesis," International Advances in Economic Research, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 23(3), pages 295-308, August.
    3. Vivek Ghosal & Yang Ye, 2015. "Uncertainty and the employment dynamics of small and large businesses," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 529-558, March.
    4. Kyle Jurado & Sydney C. Ludvigson & Serena Ng, 2015. "Measuring Uncertainty," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(3), pages 1177-1216, March.
    5. Vivek Ghosal & Yang Ye, 2015. "Uncertainty and the employment dynamics of small and large businesses," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 529-558, March.
    6. George S. Tavlas, 2011. "Two Who Called the Great Depression: An Initial Formulation of the Monetary‐Origins View," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43(2‐3), pages 565-574, March.
    7. Ghosal, Vivek & Ye, Yang, 2019. "The impact of uncertainty on the number of businesses," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    8. F. Bacchini & M. E. Bontempi & R. Golinelli & C. Jona Lasinio, 2014. "ICT and Non-ICT investments: short and long run macro dynamics," Working Papers wp956, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    9. Holmes, Mark J. & Maghrebi, Nabil, 2016. "Financial market impact on the real economy: An assessment of asymmetries and volatility linkages between the stock market and unemployment rate," The Journal of Economic Asymmetries, Elsevier, vol. 13(C), pages 1-7.
    10. Vivek Ghosal & Yang Ye, 2013. "Business Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Evidence from Employment and Number of Businesses," CESifo Working Paper Series 4312, CESifo.
    11. Maria Elena Bontempi, 2016. "Investment--uncertainty relationship: differences between intangible and physical capital," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(3), pages 240-268, April.
    12. Alexopoulos, Michelle & Cohen, Jon, 2009. "Measuring our ignorance, one book at a time: New indicators of technological change, 1909-1949," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(4), pages 450-470, May.
    13. Bontempi, Maria Elena & Golinelli, Roberto & Parigi, Giuseppe, 2010. "Why demand uncertainty curbs investment: Evidence from a panel of Italian manufacturing firms," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 218-238, March.
    14. Gabriel P. Mathy, 2020. "How much did uncertainty shocks matter in the Great Depression?," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 14(2), pages 283-323, May.

    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. Steven Gjerstad & Vernon L. Smith, 2014. "Consumption and Investment Booms in the 1920s and Their Collapse in 1930," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective, pages 81-114, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Albert Ando, 1964. "An Empirical Model of United States Economic Growth: An Exploratory Study in Applied Capital Theory," NBER Chapters, in: Models of Income Determination, pages 327-379, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Kenneth Snowden & Eugene N. White & Price Fishback, 2014. "Introduction to "Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective"," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective, pages 1-13, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Kenneth Snowden, 2014. "A Historiography of Early NBER Housing and Mortgage Research," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective, pages 15-36, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. José Luis Cendejas & Félix-Fernando Muñoz & Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo, 2017. "A contribution to the analysis of historical economic fluctuations (1870–2010): filtering, spurious cycles, and unobserved component modeling," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 11(1), pages 93-125, January.
    6. Mason Gaffney, 2018. "Corporate Power and Expansive U.S. Military Policy," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 77(2), pages 331-417, March.
    7. Guillén, Osmani Teixeira de Carvalho & Issler, João Victor & Franco-Neto, Afonso Arinos de Mello, 2014. "On the welfare costs of business-cycle fluctuations and economic-growth variation in the 20th century and beyond," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 62-78.
    8. Schulze, Max-Stephan, 2005. "An estimate of imperial Austria’s gross domestic fixed capital stock, 1870-1913: methods, sources and results," Economic History Working Papers 22325, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    9. Daniele Girardi & Antonio Mura, 2014. "The Construction-Development Curve: Evidence from a New International Dataset," The IUP Journal of Applied Economics, IUP Publications, vol. 0(3), pages 7-26, July.
    10. Azizov Haji S., 2013. "Innovation Model of Reproduction Processes of the Ukrainian Economy," Business Inform, RESEARCH CENTRE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS of NAS (KHARKIV, UKRAINE), Kharkiv National University of Economics, issue 7, pages 14-22.
    11. Barry Eichengreen, 2015. "Secular Stagnation: The Long View," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(5), pages 66-70, May.
    12. Gerben Bakker & Nicholas Crafts & Pieter Woltjer, 2019. "The Sources of Growth in a Technologically Progressive Economy: The United States, 1899–1941," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(622), pages 2267-2294.
    13. Cogley, Timothy & Nason, James M., 1995. "Effects of the Hodrick-Prescott filter on trend and difference stationary time series Implications for business cycle research," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 19(1-2), pages 253-278.
    14. Azeredo, Francisco, 2007. "The Equity Premium: A Deeper Puzzle," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt6ks5p6v5, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    15. Xavier Tafunell & Cristián Ducoing, 2015. "Non-residential capital stock in Latin America. 1875-2008," Economics Working Papers 1472, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    16. Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz, 2020. "The Incubator of Human Capital: The NBER and the Rise of the Human Capital Paradigm," NBER Working Papers 26909, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Annie Tubadji & Vassilis Angelis & Peter Nijkamp, 2016. "Kuznets' swings and intangible investments in forecast: the case of Greece," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(1), pages 56-62, January.
    18. Hugh Rockoff, 2010. "On the Origins of A Monetary History," Chapters, in: Ross B. Emmett (ed.), The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, chapter 7, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    19. Michelle Alexopoulos, 2007. "Believe it or not! The 1930s was a technologically progressive decade," 2007 Meeting Papers 195, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    20. Dezhbakhsh, Hashem & Levy, Daniel, 1994. "Periodic properties of interpolated time series," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 221-228.

    More about this item

    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:bla:econom:v:73:y:2006:i:291:p:393-412. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley Content Delivery). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.