1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The failures of American foreign lending in the 1920s had been blamed on the depression and the transfer problem of the 1930s, on conditions arising after the loans were made. Ilse Mintz relocates the fault to the moment of issue. Building a default index from the share of each year's foreign-government dollar bonds that later defaulted, she shows that loans floated early in the decade performed far better than those floated late, as lending shifted from sound areas toward Latin America and eastern Europe, and from cautious houses toward reckless ones. Risk premiums, meanwhile, fell just as quality collapsed. The mechanism she names is not dollar scarcity but investor delusion during a speculative expansion, and she ties it to business-cycle theories of over-optimism in Burns, Mitchell, Haberler, and Schumpeter.
The 1920’s were the defaultless era in foreign lending.
Does the merchandise trade balance rise or fall when a nation's economy expands? The empirical record, Mintz found, had scarcely been examined, though contradictory assumptions abounded. Working with quarterly American and British data from 1880 to 1938 and the Burns-Mitchell cycle method, she establishes that both balances swing in long cycles closely tied to domestic business, yet in opposite ways. The American balance moved inversely, sinking in late expansions and recovering sharply in early contractions; the British balance conformed positively before 1914 and then reversed to become perfectly inverse after the war. Refining the picture with a world-cycle chronology of co-phases and counter-phases, she overturns the belief that all creditor or industrial countries share a single cyclical pattern, and traces the British reversal to altered terms of trade rather than to industrialization.
General expansion depressed, contraction improved the trade balance.
Between early 1954 and early 1957 American commercial exports leapt from $11 billion to $21 billion, then fell to $15 billion by 1959, touching off alarm over the balance of payments. This occasional paper brings eight decades of evidence to bear on whether that drop was an ordinary cyclical movement or signaled a deeper loss of competitive power. Mintz declines to forecast or prescribe, using the historical record to place the 1957-59 decline among earlier contractions and judge it unexceptional once the preceding boom is weighed. Measuring exports against world imports, the imports of the world outside the United States, as her gauge of foreign demand, she argues that shifts in foreign demand govern export swings more powerfully than the domestic cycle, while exports came to track U.S. business cycles more closely after 1921 than before.
Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.
The oldest claim in the field holds that a booming home market starves exports by raising prices and absorbing goods; an expansionist rival credits growth and scale with strengthening them. Across quarterly data from 1879 to 1961, decomposed into finished manufactures, semimanufactures, crude materials, and foods, Mintz adjudicates between them. The traditional theory, she finds, holds for export quantities but not for values: domestic expansion lifted export prices even as it depressed quantities, so the two effects offset. Fluctuations in world imports, her measure of foreign demand, explain most export movement, while finished manufactures stand apart as the class largely deaf to the domestic cycle. Repressing home demand, she concludes, would not have been a promising route to larger export proceeds.
In fact, export growth is neither favorable nor unfavorable per se.
Postwar West Germany posed a puzzle: aggregate output and employment climbed almost without interruption, yet the economy plainly alternated between vigor and sluggishness. Mintz resolves it by abandoning the classical cycle, which demands absolute declines, for the growth cycle, alternating periods of above- and below-average growth that she neutrally terms speedups and slowdowns. Applying two dating methods to twenty-one indicators, deviation cycles measured against a moving-average trend and step cycles built from growth rates, and consolidating the individual turns through diffusion indexes, she fixes a monthly chronology of three and a half cycles between 1951 and 1967. Classical analysis, she shows, would register no German recession at all before 1966-67. The turning points, she insists, are genuine economic phenomena, not figments of statistical procedure.
Periods regarded as downswings by business and policy makers in Europe and Japan have not usually been characterized by declines in aggregate output, income or employment.