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

在现代宏观经济学中，预期在经济戏剧中扮演主角。这场经济思想革命对经济史具有重要影响：如果我们要理解宏观经济历史关键时刻(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强烈强调了预期的作用。Eggertssons(2008)对美国大萧条的研究是一个突出的例子，说明如何将宏观经济建模与对预期和宏观经济历史的强调结合起来。我们的研究项目建议在大西洋彼岸利用这些洞察力，研究预期对德国经济从大萧条中复苏的作用。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、更全面。如果说可信的政权更迭改变了经济参与者的通胀预期，推动了美国的复苏，那么是什么让德国经济在1932年之后转危为安？纳粹是否策划了政策体制的类似转变，帮助德国摆脱了紧缩通缩陷阱？如果不是，还有哪些机制在起作用？拟议中的项目的总体目标是描述和分析1932-1934年期间德国关键经济变量预期的变化，并在结构性宏观经济模型中评估它们对复苏的重要性。我们的目标是从公司档案和其他来源收集关于预期演变的定性和定量证据，并将它们与复苏的周期概况联系起来。该项目由三个部分组成。第一部分的目的是对德国经济从1925年到1935年的每月频率进行详细的描述性分析。为此，我们将从1936年的《德国统计手册》中数字化数百个详细的部门级产出、工资和价格时间序列，并对其进行计量经济分析。第二部分主要考察1932-34年间德国经济人的预期形成。我们的目标是从公司档案中提取微观层面的详细预期，以及来自金融市场、金融媒体和研究机构、银行和商业协会的预测的宏观经济预期。这一部分构成了本研究项目的历史核心。在该项目的第三部分，我们将使用证据来评估变化的预期对1930年代的德国经济复苏起到了什么作用。我们将开发一个结构性的、动态的宏观经济模型，该模型整合了对德国复苏的各种解释。我们将根据数据校准模型，并量化预期变化在解释1932-1934年德国经济复苏方面的相对重要性。

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.