EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Labour Markets in Recession and Recovery: The UK and the USA in the 1920s and 1930s

Timothy J. Hatton and Mark Thomas

No 1, CEH Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: We examine the labour market experience of the UK and the US in the recessions of the early 1920s and the early 1930s and the subsequent recoveries. These were deep recessions, comparable to that of 2008-9, but the recoveries were very different. In the UK the recovery of the 1920s was incomplete but that of the 1930s was rather less protracted than in the US. By contrast the US experienced very strong recovery in the 1920s but weaker recovery from the much deeper recession of the 1930s. A key ingredient to understanding these patterns is the interaction between economic shocks and labour market institutions. Here we survey the large literature on interwar labour markets to identify the key elements that underpinned labour market performance. We find that developments in wage setting institutions and in unemployment insurance inhibited a return to full employment in interwar Britain while in the US, New Deal legislation impeded labour market adjustment in the 1930s. We conclude with an assessment of the policy responses to labour market crises in the past and in the present

JEL-codes: J64 J65 N12 N14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEH/WP201201.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:hpaper:001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEH Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:auu:hpaper:001