On Tuesday March 8, Andrew Jalil will talk about “Inflation Expectations and Recovery from the Depression in the Spring of 1933: Evidence from the Narrative Record”. Dr. Jalil is a professor of economics at Occidental College. He obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley. His main research interests are macroeconomics and economic history. His past research focuses on the causes and effects of financial crisis, macroeconomic policy during the great depression and effects of monetary and fiscal policy.
In their Federal Reserve Board paper “Inflation Expectations and Recovery from the Depression in the Spring of 1933: Evidence from the Narrative Record” Dr.Jalil and coauthor Gisela Rua use historical narrative records to help determine whether inflation expectation shifted during 1933. This narrative record may help us understand the role of monetary policy and expectations in the U.S. recovery from the great depression. Abandoning the Gold Standard may also have inflation expectations. But in a 2015 NBER paper Academics as Advisors: Gold, the ‘Brains Trust,’ and FDR Sebastian Edwards argues that when Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in 1933 he had no idea what would happen since “neither Roosevelt nor his inner circle had a strong view on gold or the dollar. They did believe in the need to experiment with different policies in order to get the country out of the slump. Tinkering with the value of the currency was a possible area for experimentation; but it was an option with a relatively low priority…. Until inauguration day FDR’s views on the gold standard were ambivalent and noncommittal; he was neither a diehard fan of the system, nor was he a severe critic.” In another recent paper, “A New History of Banking Panics in the United States, 1825–1929: Construction and Implications” (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015), addresses the major problems in identifying the output effects of banking panics of the pre–Great Depression era. Dr. Jalil shows that banking panics were a primary source of business-cycle fluctuations throughout US history. He finds that downturns with major banking panics differed substantially from downturns without them, and that following banking panics, output does not rapidly revert back to its pre-panic trend path .
Department Seminar: Tuesday, 8st March, 4 – 5:15 pm
Economics Conference Room, Dealy Hall E-530
