EH221      One Unit
Boom and Bust: Macroeconomic History of the Modern World

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Business cycles have destabilised societies for centuries. These fluctuations are mini-disasters that are associated with drops in welfare and economic growth. Beyond the economic costs, business cycles have other adverse effects, such as on health and politics.

This course explores the short-run in a long-run perspective to understand the causes and consequences of business cycles. The first part of the course covers the basics: how to define and measure business cycles, the costs of business cycles, the key business cycle facts, and models of the business cycle. The second part investigates propagation mechanisms, such as sticky prices and wages. The third part of the course focuses on impulses, such as shocks to technology, economic policy, financial crises, expectations, and uncertainty.

The course studies advanced and developing economies from the Industrial Revolution to the present. This interval of modern economic history includes deep recessions, major financial panics, reversals of expectations, and episodes of nominal inertia.

1 hours of lectures and 1 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 9 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays in the AT and WT.

• Alexopoulos, M., and Cohen, J. S., ‘The Media is the Measure: Technical Change and Employment, 1909–49’, Review of Economic and Statistics, 98 (2016), 792–810.
• Baker, S. R., Bloom, N., and Davis, S. J., ‘Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131 (2016), pp. 1593–636.
• Bernanke, B. S., and Carey, K., ‘Nominal Wage Stickiness and Aggregate Supply in the Great Depression’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111 (1996), pp. 853–83.
• Cloyne, J., ‘Discretionary Tax Changes and the Macroeconomy: New Narrative Evidence from the United Kingdom’, American Economic Review, 103 (2013), pp. 1507–28.
• Jalil, A., ‘A New History of Banking Panics in the United States, 1825–1929: Construction and Implications’, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 7 (2015), pp. 295–330.
• Jordà, O., Schularick, M., and Taylor, A. M., ‘Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts’, in M. Eichenbaum and J. A. Parker, eds., NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2016 (Chicago, 2017), pp. 213–63.
• Jordà, O., Schularick, M., and Taylor, A. M., ‘Disasters Everywhere: The Costs of Business Cycles Reconsidered’, NBER Working Paper 26962 (2020).
• Lennard, J., ‘Did Monetary Policy Matter? Narrative Evidence from the Classical Gold Standard’, Explorations in Economic History, 68 (2018), pp. 16–36.
• Nakamura, E., Steinsson, J., Sun, P., and Villar, D., ‘The Elusive Costs of Inflation: Price Dispersion during the U.S. Great Inflation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133 (2018), pp. 1933–80.
• Romer, C. D., ‘Remeasuring Business Cycles’, Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), pp. 573–609.
• Temin, P., and Wigmore, B. A., ‘The End of One Big Deflation’, Explorations in Economic History, 27 (1990), pp. 483–502.

Exam (70%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Essay (30%, 3000 words)