This award provides support to Dr. Christina Romer under the National Science Foundation's Faculty Awards for Women Scientists and Engineers Program. The objectives of this program are to recognize the nation's most outstanding and promising women scientists and engineers in academic careers in research and teaching, to retain them in academia, and to facilitate the further development of their careers. This award will allow the investigator to pursue her research interests which focuses on the nature and causes of business cycles in the period before World War II, in the hopes of learning more about how the modern economy operates and about what can be done to prevent or mitigate business cycles in the future. Three projects will be undertaken. The first will analyze the role of macroeconomic policy stabilization of real output during the Great Depression. The second will involve examining whether monetary and fiscal policies in the post war era have tended to in general to counteract or exacerbate movements in real output. The third project will extend the PI's previous work on historical macroeconomic data. Her previous work has shown that since the conventional series is seriously flawed, it is important to look for new and better sources of prewar data.
