An Establishment-Level View of the Great Depression

大萧条是美国历史上最严重的经济危机，因此引起了经济学家的极大兴趣。不管是好是坏，大萧条都是众多经济政策辩论的试金石。出于这个原因，任何有助于我们理解这一时期的贡献都将加强围绕这些问题的辩论的质量，并将导致更好的政策。几乎所有关于大萧条的现有研究都依赖于汇总数据，这使得经济学家对衰退和复苏的理解不完整。这个项目的目标是收集大萧条时期两组全面的微观观察结果。第一个来源是1929年、1931年、1933年和1935年进行的制造业普查。将公开发布的综合样本将把新收集的一组行业与以前收集的特定州和行业的数据结合起来。总的来说，这里提出的样本将占现有时间表的10%以上。人口普查记录的一个限制是缺乏有关机构或其母公司财务状况的资料。我们的第二个数据来源是邓白氏（D&amp；B）的记录，这是当时一家主要的信用评级机构，填补了这一空白。特别是，这一来源提供了一种衡量信誉的方法，类似于现代信用评级，以及对企业净值的估计。这个项目的最终产品将成为一个真正的公共产品，作为经济历史学家和宏观经济学家研究大萧条的核心资源。然后，我们计划回答一些简单但关键的问题，这些问题涉及关键宏观总量的下降，包括就业和价格水平。我们还将把这些机构的业主与1920年和1930年的人口普查联系起来，以获得人口资料。这将使我们能够研究，特别是对于小企业主，他们自己的哪些特征有助于预测生存。这将有助于深入了解信贷限制在大萧条中所扮演的角色。最后，我们将利用将企业与其母公司联系起来的能力来研究企业内部资源“市场”的作用。特别是，我们将讨论它们是否可以替代当时失灵的外部资本市场。对于最后两个项目，d&b记录对于提供有关企业对外部信贷依赖程度的信息至关重要。

The Great Depression was the most serious economic crisis in American history and so has attracted great interest from economists. For good or bad, the Depression serves as a litmus test for numerous economic policy debates. For this reason, any contribution to our understanding of this period strengthens the quality of debate surrounding these issues and will lead to better policy. Almost all existing studies of the Depression have relied on aggregate data, leaving economists with an incomplete understanding of the decline and recovery.The goal of this project is collect two comprehensive sets of micro-level observations from the Great Depression. The first source is the Census of Manufactures taken in 1929, 1931, 1933, and 1935. The comprehensive sample, which would be released publicly, would combine a newly collected set of industries with previously collected data on particular states and industries. In total, the sample proposed here will comprise more than 10% of the extant schedules. A limitation of the Census records is a lack of information on the financial position of the establishments or their parent companies. Our second source of data is the records of Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), a major credit rating agency at the time, which fills that gap. In particular, this source provides a measure of creditworthiness, similar to modern credit ratings, and an estimate of the establishment's net worth. The end product of this project will be a true public good serving as a central resource for economic historians and macroeconomists studying the Depression.We then plan to answer some simple though crucial questions regarding the declines in key macro aggregates, including employment and the price level. We also will link the owners of the establishments to the population censuses of 1920 and 1930 to obtain demographic information. This will allow us to study, particularly for small business owners, what characteristics of the owners themselves helped predict survival. This will offer insights into the role of credit constraints in the Depression. Finally, we will use the ability to link the establishments into their parent companies to study the role of "markets" for resources inside of the firm. In particular, we will address whether they can act as a substitute for the malfunctioning external capital markets at the time. For these last two projects, the D&B records will be crucial in providing information on the dependence of businesses on external credit.