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Schwartz, Anna Jacobson., Friedman, Milton. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Germany: Princeton University Press, 2008. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Monetary_History_of_the_United_States/Q7J_EUM3RfoC?hl=en&gbpv=0 

        In A Monetary History of the United States, Shwartz and Friedman explore and trace the changes in the stock of money from the Civil War era to the 1960s. They examine the factors that accounted for these changes, while analyzing the influence the stock market had on the course of events during that time period. They argue that the changes in money supply had unintended detrimental consequences while implying that coherent monetary policy is necessary for economic stability. While the main theme of the book is money supply, Friedman and Shwartz dig deeper, focusing on the ratio of cash that people hold in their checking deposits, the ratio of bank deposits to bank reserves, and high powered money during and after the Great Depression. In doing this, they identify the four main policy mistakes that the Federal Reserve made that led to a decline in money supply, and eventually the Great Depression.  

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Gertler, Mark, and Simon Gilchrist. “What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2018. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fjep.32.3.3. 

        In the journal article, “What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession”, Gertler and Gilchrist argue that a complete description of the Great Recession has to take into account the financial distress that households, nonfinancial firms, and banks faced as the crisis  amid the crisis and its unfolding. They specifically mention that because of ideologies stating how before the crisis, the macroeconomic models created by financiers assumed frictionless and flawless financial markets, the crisis was not anticipated or discussed. In the aftermath caused by this blindsided Recession, there was an explosion of theoretical and empirical research that explored and investigated the events leading up to the Recession. Gertler and Gilchrist use this research and data to analyze how much house price decline, banking distressing indicators and unemployment contributed to the Recession. They display evidence that the household balance sheet is one of the most important artifacts when examining how and why the economy began to decline and come to the conclusion that the disruption in banking was, in fact, central to the overall decrease in employment which was a huge factor in the Great Recession. 

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Bernanke, Ben S, 1983. "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in Propagation of the Great Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(3), pages 257-276, June. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1808111?seq=1 

        In the journal article, “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in Propagation of the Great Depression,” Ben Bernanke examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s, exploring the aggregate output during the period. His approach is similar to Friedman and Schwartz who investigate the monetary impact of bank failures. However, Bernanke focuses on the non-monetary, in return, the primarily credit-related aspects of the financial crisis and considers issues of the debtors as well as issues of the banking system. His extended approach comes to the conclusion that the financial disruptions of the Great Depression actually ended up reducing the efficiency of the credit allocation process - how a bank divides its financial resources - and because of this, the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit, weakened the accumulated demand. Bernanke also supplies evidence to suggest and explain the depth and length of the Great Depression as a result of the inefficient credit allocation process. 

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Eichengreen, Barry J.. Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1995. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Golden_Fetters/Qk1flhynCD8C?hl=en&gbpv=0 

        In Gold Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939, Eichengreen explores the connections between the gold standard, which is the framework that regulated international money affairs until 1931, and the Great Depression which began in 1929. He shows economic policies, working together with the imbalances that were created by World War I, actually gave rise to the global crisis of the 1930s. He emphasizes how the gold standard compelled and supported the economic policies that were pursued, which was a huge reason why the economic environment was unstable throughout the implementation of the policies. This brought him to his main thesis and argument that the proximate cause of the world depression was actually an efficient and poorly managed international gold standard for many reasons, creating opportunities for individual countries to escape the deflation that was occurring and abandon the gold standard, further pushing the country into a depression. 

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Bernanke, Ben S.. Essays on the Great Depression. Ukraine: Princeton University Press, 2009. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Essays_on_the_Great_Depression/tGiktQc6yWMC?hl=en&gbpv=0 

        In Essays on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke illuminates the incomparable period of the Great Depression. In his collection of essays, Bernanke also demonstrates that while the Great Depression was an unparalleled disaster, there were economies that recovered faster than others, taking the depression as an opportunity to grow economically. Bernanke compares and contrasts the economic strategies and statistics of the world's nations as they struggled to survive economically. In each essay, he emphasizes the fundamental lessons of macroeconomics in relation to a background of huge human suffering, displaying a coherent view of the economic causes and global propagation of the Great Depression. 

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Romer, Christina. “What Ended the Great Depression?” EconPapers, July 17, 2014. https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/nbrnberwo/3829.htm.   

        In the journal entry, “What Ended the Great Depression”, Christina Romer examines the role of aggregate demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. She argues that the recovery of the U.S economy, at least prior to the 1940s, was due to monetary expansion. She uses evidence, including information that indicates huge gold inflows from the 1930s that increased the U.S money stock, in order to prove that the economy was stimulated by lowering real interest rates and incuropages investment spending and purchase of durable goods. Her main finding, that monetary developments were crucial to the economic recovery, shows that self correction by U.S citizens did not play such a big role in the recovery and growth of the U.S economy between 1933 and 1942. More specifically though, Romer examines the source of recovery from the Great Depression in great detail, suggesting that in the absence of aggregate demand stimuli, the economy would have remained depressed more deeply and for a longer period of time.

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Thiede, Brian C., and Shannon M. Monnat. "The Great Recession and America’s Geography of Unemployment." Demographic Research 35 (2016): 891-928. Accessed November 8, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26332098. 

        In the research article, “The Great Recession and America's Geography of Unemployment”, Thiede and Monnat argue that the recession was associated with increased inequality between county labor markets within states, but also associated with declining between-state differences. They show evidence of countries that disproportionately experienced recession-related increases in unemployment, mostly emphasizing that those affected by unemployment were low income counties with larger populations of BIPOC. In order to argue this, Thiede and Monnat calculated and decomposed Theil Indexes in order to find and describe the recession-related changes in the distribution of unemployment rates between each county and state. They also used exploratory spatial statistics in order to identify the geographic clusters of countries that did experience similar changes in unemployment and were able to evaluate associations between the impact on unemployment by demographic composition, industrial structure, and state context. 

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Aiginger, Karl. “The Great Recession vs. the Great Depression: Stylized Facts on Siblings That Were Given Different Foster Parents” Economics eJournal Archive. Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) and Vienna University of Economics and Business, May 25, 2010. http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/journalarticles/2010-18 

        In Karl Aiginger’s paper, “The Great Recession vs. the Great Depression: Stylized Facts on Siblings That Were Given Different Foster Parents”, he compares the depth of the Great Recession and the Great Depression. He uses a new data set to compare the drop in industrial activity for seven activity indicators with the assumption that the 2008 crisis leveled off in 2009 for production and might have done the same for unemployment in 2010. Aigingers data proved that the difference in depth between the two crises occurred with different policy reactions. For example, Aiginger shows how the monetary policy and fiscal policy were applied courageously, speedily and partly internationally coordinated during the Great Recession. On the other hand, during the Great Depression for several years fiscal policy tried to stabilize budgets instead of aggregate demand, and either monetary policy was not applied or proved to be ineffective as deflation turned lower nominal interest rates into higher real rates. Aiginger's tentative conclusion when writing the paper was that economic policy prevented the 2008 crisis from developing into a second Great Depression.  

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Bianchi, Francesco. “The Great Depression and the Great Recession: A View from Financial Markets.” NBER, March 30, 2015. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21056 

        In the journal article, “The Great Depression and the Great Recession: A View from Financial Markets'', Francesco Bianchi identifies the similarities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession with respect to the behavior of financial markets. His findings include evidence of a Great Depression regime, which implies a collapse of the stock market with small growth stocks outperforming small-value stocks, even in a smaller crisis like in 2008. From this, Bianchi argues that policy intervention that occurred in 2008 prevented the crisis from turning into a second Great Depression. Using and referencing an MS-VAR, he introduces the main similarities between both crises. The first similarity is that both periods were characterized by high volatility, which means that the value can potentially be spread out over a larger range of values so the price can change dramatically over a short time period in either direction. Another similarity Bianchi discusses is that both during the stock market crash that opened the Great Depression and the fall in the stock market that characterized the beginning of the Great Recession, shocks to market returns and the value spread were negatively correlated. This shows that during crises, innovations to the relative return of growth stocks move in an opposite direction with respect to stock market returns.

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Stiglitz, Joseph E. n.d. “Interpreting the Causes of the Great Depression.” Accessed November 11, 2020.https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/2009_Interpreting_Causes.pdf. 

       In Joseph Stiglitz’s paper, “Interpreting the Causes of the Great Recession”, he establishes what was actually responsible for the failures in the financial system during the Great Recession. He focuses on the flawed incentives and models, arguing that the regulators at the time should have recognized that there were certain risks created by past financial failures and. He also identifies some of the other factors that might have contributed to the immensity of the crisis and the inefficient risk assessments that were supposed to be done by investors. He discusses the idea that there were certain mistakes made by financiers at the time that may have contributed to the immensity of the crisis, while affecting the timing, yet the crisis probably would have occurred anyway. Stiglitz also argues that low interest rates are and were not necessary or sufficient for the existence of economic bubbles. That low interest rates could have been beneficial to the economy of government funds had been allocated well enough and risks had been effectively managed by the financial system. The argument that interests were necessary for the bubbles actually just is a clear indication of an attempt to shift the blame away from the central failures of the financial situation that were responsible for the crisis. In arguing this, Stiglitz seeks to explain the failures of this financial system, including things like shortsighted behavior, excessive risk taking, and deficiencies in corporate governance. 

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Earling Barth, James Davis, Richard Freeman, and Sari Pekkala Kerr. "Weathering the Great Recession: Variation in Employment Responses, by Establishments and Countries." RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3, no. 3 (2017): 50-69. Accessed November 11, 2020. doi:10.7758/rsf.2017.3.3.03. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.7758/rsf.2017.3.3.03.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-5187_SYC-5188%252F5187&refreqid=excelsior%3Aae0bb7e3355c149ee45d2a036ae65b21 

        In the paper, "Weathering the Great Recession: Variation in Employment Responses, by Establishments and Countries”, Erling Barth, James Davis, Richard Freeman, and Sari Pekkala Kerr find and discuss that U.S employment changed differently in relation to the output of the Great Recession and the recovery in other countries at that time as well as the United States in other recessions. They indicate that instead of hoarding labor, U.S firms actually reduced the employment proportion more than the output during the crisis, but only with establishments that survived the downturn contracting jobs hugely. Trying to move away from the pattern of aggregation, the U.S manufactures also rescued employment, but this time less than the output, even though the range of employment to output varied among different establishments. Barth, Davis, Freeman, and Kerr all argue that the various responses of the employment to output challenged the remaining enterprises enough to adjust over the business cycle, implying one reason why the Great Recession didn’t turn into a depression.

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Inklaar, Robert, Herman De Jong, and Reitze Gouma. "Did Technology Shocks Drive the Great Depression? Explaining Cyclical Productivity Movements in U.S. Manufacturing, 1919-1939." The Journal of Economic History 71, no. 4 (2011): 827-58. Accessed November 12, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41353847?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 

        In this paper, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Reitze Gaouma investigate how technology shocks and declining productivity have proven to be important factors that drove the Great Depression in the United States. They do this by focusing on the real business cycle theory which is a class of classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations to a large extent can be accounted for by real shocks. They additionally estimate an improved measure of technology for interwar manufacturing using data from the U.S census reports in the past 100 years. They find that there is clear evidence of increasing returns to scale and end up finding no statistical proof that technology shocks did lead to changes in the hours worked or any other imputes. They discuss how this actually contradicts the key prediction of the real business cycle theory and discover that increasing returns to scale are not due to market power, but even due to labor and capital hoarding.