NBER Publications by Jose Ursua

Long-term data for 30 countries up to 2006 reveal 232 stock-market crashes (multi-year real returns of –25% or less) and 100 depressions (multi-year macroeconomic declines of 10% or more), with 71 of the cases matched by timing. The United States has two of the matched events—the Great Depression 1929–33 and the post-WWI years 1917–21, likely driven by the Great Influenza Epidemic. 41% of the matched cases are associated with war, and the two world wars are prominent. Conditional on a stock-market crash (return of –25% or less) in a non-war environment, the probability of a minor depression (macroeconomic decline of at least 10%) is 22% and of a major depression (at least 25%) is 3%. For contexts of currency or banking crises that occur during times of global distress, these probabilit...

We build on the Maddison GDP data to assemble international time series from before 1914 on real per capita personal consumer expenditure, C. We also improve the GDP data in many cases. The C variable comes closer than GDP to the consumption concept that enters into usual asset-pricing equations. (A separation of consumer expenditure into durables and non-durables is feasible for only a minority of cases.) We have essentially full annual data on C for 22 countries and GDP for 35 countries, and we plan to complete the long-term time series for a few more countries. For samples that start as early as 1870, we apply a peak-to-trough method for each country to isolate economic crises, defined as cumulative declines in C or GDP by at least 10%. The principal world economic crises ranked by impo...