The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression

Christina D. Romer

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1990, vol. 105, issue 3, 597-624

Abstract: This paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in October 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income which led consumers to forgo purchases of durable goods. That the Great Crash generated uncertainty is evidenced by the decline in surety expressed by contemporary forecasters. That this uncertainty affected consumer behavior is shown by the fact that spending on consumer durables declined drastically in late 1929, while spending on perishable goods rose slightly. This effect is confirmed by the fact that there is a significant negative relationship between stock market variability and the production of consumer durables in the prewar era.

Date: 1990
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (302)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2937892 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:qjecon:v:105:y:1990:i:3:p:597-624.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().