IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this paper

The anatomy of a credit crisis: the boom and bust in farm land prices in the United States in the 1920s

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Rodney Ramcharan
  • Raghuram G. Rajan

Abstract

Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? What channels could it work through? What are the long run consequences? In this paper we address these questions by examining the farm land price boom (and bust) in the United States that preceded the Great Depression. We find that credit availability likely had a direct effect on inflating land prices. Credit availability may have also amplified the relationship between the perceived improvement in fundamentals and land prices. When the perceived fundamentals soured, however, areas with higher ex ante credit availability suffered a greater fall in land prices, and experienced higher bank failure rates. Land prices stayed low for a number of decades after the bust in areas that had higher credit availability, suggesting that the effects of booms and busts induced by credit availability might be persistent. We draw lessons for regulatory policy.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2012/201262/201262abs.html
Download Restriction: no
File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2012/201262/201262pap.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) in its series Finance and Economics Discussion Series with number 2012-62.

as
in new window

Length:
Date of creation: 2012
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2012-62
Contact details of provider: Postal:
20th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20551

Web page: http://www.federalreserve.gov/

More information through EDIRC

Order Information: Web: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/fedsorder.html

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
  • 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
  • N22 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
  • N52 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
  • Q12 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets
  • Q14 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Finance

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as
in new window


  1. Williamson, Oliver E, 1988. " Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 43(3), pages 567-591, July.
  2. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1992. " Liquidation Values and Debt Capacity: A Market Equilibrium Approach," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(4), pages 1343-1366, September.
  3. Raghuram G. Rajan & Rodney Ramcharan, 2011. "Land and Credit: A Study of the Political Economy of Banking in the United States in the Early 20th Century," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(6), pages 1895-1931, December.
  4. A. Colin Cameron & Jonah B. Gelbach & Douglas L. Miller, 2011. "Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(2), pages 238-249, April.
  5. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2004. "Does Local Financial Development Matter?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 119(3), pages 929-969.
  6. Raghuram G. Rajan, 1994. "Why Bank Credit Policies Fluctuate: A Theory and Some Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 109(2), pages 399-441.
  7. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, 2009. "The Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion: Evidence from the U.S. Mortgage Default Crisis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 124(4), pages 1449-1496.
  8. Mitchell A. Petersen & Raghuram G. Rajan, 1995. "The Effect of Credit Market Competition on Lending Relationships," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 110(2), pages 407-443.
  9. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 2004. "Competition and Financial Stability," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 36(3), pages 453-480, June.
  10. Edward L. Glaeser & Joshua D. Gottlieb & Joseph Gyourko, 2012. "Can Cheap Credit Explain the Housing Boom?," NBER Chapters,in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 301-359 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  11. White, Eugene Nelson, 1981. "State-Sponsored Insurance of Bank Deposits in the United States, 1907–1929," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 41(03), pages 537-557, September.
  12. Thomas J. Holmes & Sanghoon Lee, 2012. "Economies of Density versus Natural Advantage: Crop Choice on the Back Forty," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 94(1), pages 1-19, February.
  13. O'Hara, Maureen, 1983. "Tax-Exempt Financing: Some Lessons from History," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 15(4), pages 425-441, November.
  14. Thomas J. Holmes, 1998. "The Effect of State Policies on the Location of Manufacturing: Evidence from State Borders," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(4), pages 667-705, August.
  15. Bernanke, Ben & Gertler, Mark, 1989. "Agency Costs, Net Worth, and Business Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 14-31, March.
  16. Raghuram G. Rajan & Rodney Ramcharan, 2016. "Constituencies and Legislation: The Fight Over the McFadden Act of 1927," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(7), pages 1843-1859, July.
  17. 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 257-276, June.
  18. Oded Galor & Omer Moav & Dietrich Vollrath, 2009. "Inequality in Landownership, the Emergence of Human-Capital Promoting Institutions, and the Great Divergence," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 76(1), pages 143-179.
  19. Harrison Hong & Jeremy C. Stein, 2007. "Disagreement and the Stock Market," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(2), pages 109-128, Spring.
  20. Evanoff, Douglas D, 1988. "Branch Banking and Service Accessibility," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 20(2), pages 191-202, May.
  21. Jose A. Scheinkman & Wei Xiong, 2003. "Overconfidence and Speculative Bubbles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(6), pages 1183-1219, December.
  22. Randall S. Kroszner & Philip E. Strahan, 1999. "What Drives Deregulation? Economics and Politics of the Relaxation of Bank Branching Restrictions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 114(4), pages 1437-1467.
  23. Blattman, Christopher & Hwang, Jason & Williamson, Jeffrey G., 2007. "Winners and losers in the commodity lottery: The impact of terms of trade growth and volatility in the Periphery 1870-1939," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 156-179, January.
  24. Alston Lee J. & Grove Wayne A. & Wheelock David C., 1994. "Why Do Banks Fail? Evidence from the 1920s," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 409-431, October.
  25. Alston, Lee J., 1983. "Farm Foreclosures in the United States During the Interwar Period," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 43(04), pages 885-903, December.
  26. Alston, Lee J, 1984. "Farm Foreclosure Moratorium Legislation: A Lesson from the Past," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 445-457, June.
  27. Calomiris, Charles W., 1990. "Is Deposit Insurance Necessary? A Historical Perspective," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 50(02), pages 283-295, June.
  28. Eichengreen, Barry, 1984. "Mortgage Interest Rates in the Populist Era," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(5), pages 995-1015, December.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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

as
in new window


Cited by:

  1. Steinar Holden, 2012. "Implications of insights from behavioral economics for macroeconomic models," Working Paper 2012/12, Norges Bank.
  2. Sam Langfield & Marco Pagano, 2016. "Bank bias in Europe: effects on systemic risk and growth," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 31(85), pages 51-106.
  3. SERGI BASCO & John P. Tang, 2017. "The Samurai Bond: Credit Supply And Economic Growth In Pre-War Japan," CEH Discussion Papers 05, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
  4. Anthony A. DeFusco & Charles G. Nathanson & Eric Zwick, 2017. "Speculative Dynamics of Prices and Volume," NBER Working Papers 23449, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. Rodney Ramcharan & Stéphane Verani & Skander J. Van Den Heuvel, 2016. "From Wall Street to Main Street: The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Consumer Credit Supply," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 71(3), pages 1323-1356, 06.
  6. Jeremy G. Weber & Nigel Key, 2014. "Do Wealth Gains from Land Appreciation Cause Farmers to Expand Acreage or Buy Land?," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1334-1348.
  7. Acharya, Viral & Naqvi, Hassan, 2012. "The seeds of a crisis: A theory of bank liquidity and risk taking over the business cycle," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(2), pages 349-366.
  8. Rajan, Raghuram & Ramcharan, Rodney, 2016. "Local financial capacity and asset values: Evidence from bank failures," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(2), pages 229-251.
  9. Henderson, Jason & Kauffman, Nathan, 2013. "Farm investment and leverage cycles: will this time be different?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, issue Q II, pages 89-114.
  10. Claudio Borio & Magdalena Erdem & Andrew Filardo & Boris Hofmann, 2015. "The costs of deflations: a historical perspective," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
  11. Ehsan U. Choudhri & Lawrence L. Schembri, 2013. "A Tale of Two Countries and Two Booms, Canada and the United States in the 1920s and the 2000s: The Roles of Monetary and Financial Stability Policies," Working Paper Series 44_13, The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
  12. Eric Zwick & Charles Nathanson & Anthony DeFusco, 2017. "Speculative Dynamics of Prices and Volume," 2017 Meeting Papers 239, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  13. Carola Moreno & Carlos Saavedra & Bárbara Ulloa, 2014. "Commodity Price Cycles and Financial Stability," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 738, Central Bank of Chile.
  14. KURASHIMA Daichi & MIZUNAGA Masashi & ODAKI Kazuhiko & WATANABE Wako, 2013. "Is Leverage a Determinant of Asset Price? Evidence from real estate transaction data," Discussion papers 13082, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
  15. repec:eee:jjieco:v:44:y:2017:i:c:p:90-98 is not listed on IDEAS

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2012-62. 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: (Franz Osorio)

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 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.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.