Economists' fascination with the description and interpretation of the severity and duration of the Great Depression has not flagged in the seven decades since its onset. What began as an investigation centering on the U.S. Depression experience has broadened in recent years to cover the experience of countries around the world.
At least five of the nine essays that Bernanke has collected in this volume (some with coauthors, and only one not previously published) analyze quantitative data for a sample of countries in addition to the United States. He is a careful econometrician, scrupulous in his discussion of weaknesses in the data and problems in the econometrics. His interpretation of his findings is consonant with the current consensus views on the Depression that the economics profession espouses.
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