Great Expectations? Germany's Recovery from the Great Depression, 1932-1936

远大的期望？

• 批准号: 275863396
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Philip Jung
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Professur VWL (Makroökonomie)
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/275863396?language=en
• 关键词: Great; Expectations; Germany; Recovery; Depression

In modern macroeconomics, expectations play the lead role in the economic drama. This revolution in economic thinking has important implications for economic history: if we are to understand the course of events in key moments of macroeconomic history such as the Great Depression, economic historians must study the expectations of contemporary economic agents. Recent scholarship on the Great Depression has consequently put strong emphasis on the role of expectations. Eggertssons (2008) study of the Great Depression in the U.S. is a prominent example how to combine macroeconomic modeling with its emphasis on expectations and macroeconomic history. Our research project proposes to take up these insights across the Atlantic and study the role of expectations for the recovery of the German economy from the Great Depression. By some measures, the German economic recovery under Hitler was faster and more complete than the American one under Roosevelt. If a credible regime change that altered the inflation expectations of economic actors prompted the U.S. recovery, what made the German economy turn the corner after 1932? Did the Nazis engineer a comparable shift in the policy regime that helped escape from the contractionary deflation trap, or, if not, what other mechanisms were at work?The overarching objective of the proposed project is to describe and analyse the changes of expectations about key economic variables in Germany from 1932-1934 and evaluate their importance for the recovery in a structural macroeconomic model. We aim to assemble qualitative and quantitative evidence about the evolution of expectations from company archives and other sources and relate them to the cyclical profile of the recovery. The project consists of three parts. The objective of the first part is to provide a detailed descriptive analysis of the German economy from 1925 to 1935 on a monthly frequency. For this purpose, we will digitize a few hundred detailed sector-level time series on output, wages, and prices from the Konjunkturstatistisches Handbuch of 1936 and analyse them econometrically. The second part of the project focuses on the expectation formation of economic agents in Germany in the years 1932-34. Our aim is to extract detailed expectations on the micro-level from company archives as well as macroeconomic expectations from financial markets, the financial press, and forecasts of research institutes, banks and business associations. This part forms the historical core of the research project. In the third part of the project, we will use the evidence to evaluate what role changing expectations played for the German recovery in the 1930s. We will develop a structural dynamic macroeconomic model that integrates various explanations for the German recovery. We will calibrate the model to the data and quantify the relative importance of expectation changes in accounting for the German recovery from 1932-1934.

在现代宏观经济学中，预期在经济戏剧中扮演主角。这场经济思想的革命对经济史具有重要意义：如果我们要理解宏观经济史上关键时刻（如大萧条）的事件进程，经济史学家必须研究当代经济主体的预期。因此，最近关于大萧条的学术研究非常强调预期的作用。Eggertssons（2008）对美国大萧条的研究是如何将联合收割机宏观经济建模与其对预期和宏观经济历史的强调相结合的一个突出例子。我们的研究项目建议采取这些见解跨越大西洋和研究的作用，对德国经济的复苏，从大萧条的预期。从某些方面来看，希特勒领导下的德国经济复苏比罗斯福领导下的美国经济复苏更快、更彻底。如果说一个可信的政权更迭改变了经济参与者的通胀预期，从而推动了美国的复苏，那么是什么让德国经济在1932年后出现了转机？纳粹是否在政策体系中设计了一个类似的转变，帮助摆脱了收缩性通缩陷阱？如果不是，还有什么其他机制在起作用？该项目的总体目标是描述和分析1932-1934年德国主要经济变量的预期变化，并在结构性宏观经济模型中评估其对复苏的重要性。我们的目标是从公司档案和其他来源收集有关预期演变的定性和定量证据，并将其与经济复苏的周期性特征联系起来。该项目包括三个部分。第一部分的目的是对1925年至1935年的德国经济进行详细的描述性分析。为此，我们将从1936年出版的《Konjunkturstatistisches Handbuch》中选取几百个详细的部门级产出、工资和价格时间序列，并对它们进行计量经济学分析。第二部分着重于1932- 1934年间德国经济主体的预期形成。我们的目标是从公司档案中提取微观层面的详细预期，以及从金融市场、金融媒体以及研究机构、银行和商业协会的预测中提取宏观经济预期。这一部分构成了本课题研究的历史核心。在本项目的第三部分中，我们将使用证据来评估预期的变化在20世纪30年代德国经济复苏中所起的作用。我们将开发一个结构性动态宏观经济模型，整合德国复苏的各种解释。我们将根据数据对模型进行校准，并量化预期变化对1932-1934年德国经济复苏的相对重要性。