Department of Economics
and International Business School
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 9110
415 South Street
Waltham MA 02454-9110

Sachar International Center, Room 126
(781) 736-2242
ghall@brandeis.edu

Introductory Information from the International Business School's main web site.

RePEc/IDEAS page

SSRN page

Google Scholar page

Curriculum Vitae

George J. Hall

Professor

Department of Economics

Brandeis University

WORKING PAPERS

"Costs of Financing US Federal Debt Under a Gold Standard: 1791-1933" (with Jonathan Payne, Balint Szoke, and Thomas Sargent) July 2022.

"US Federal Debt 1776-1960: Prices and Quantities" (with Jonathan Payne, Thomas Sargent and Balint Szoke), updated August 2021.

• The data are available from https://github.com/jepayne/US-Federal-Debt-Public
• An excel spreadheet reporting the par value and market value of the debt from January 1790 to December 2022 (updated 3/6/2023)
• An excel spreadheet reporting monthly holding period returns on US Treasury debt held by the public from January 1790 to December 2022

"A Comparison of Discrete and Parameteric Approximation Methods for Continuous-State Dynamic Programming Problems" (with Hugo Benitez-Silva, Gunter Hitsch, Giorgio Pauletto, and John Rust), October 2000. This paper is preliminary and incomplete.

"An (S,s) Model of Commodity Price Speculation" (with John Rust), November 1999. [postscript file] [pdf file]

PUBLISHED PAPERS

"Financing Big US Federal Expenditures Surges: COVID-19 and Earlier US Wars" (with Thomas J. Sargent), chapter 10 in How Monetary Policy Got Behind the Curve -- And How to Get Back (editors Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and John B. Taylor) Stanford, CA: Hoover, 2023.

"Three World Wars: Fiscal-Monetary Consequences" (with Thomas Sargent), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119, No. 18, May 3, 2022, pp. e2200349119.

• Appendix
  
• Data and Computer Code (zip file)
  

"Debt and Taxes in Eight U.S. Wars and Two Insurrections" (with Thomas Sargent), chapter 27 of The Handbook of Historical Economics (editors Alberto Bison and Giovanni Federico), Academic Press, 2021.

"Estimation of Endogenously Sampled Time Series: The Case of Commodity Price Speculation in the Steel Market" (with John Rust), Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 22, Issue 1 Part A, May 2021. pp. 219-243.

"Complications for the United States from International Credits: 1913-1940" (with Thomas Sargent), chapter 1 of Debt and Entanglements Between the Wars (editor Era Dabla-Norris), IMF, 2019.

• For the "Reader's Digest" version, see the summary on page 2 of the Treasury Historical Association Newsletter, December 2019
  

"Interest Rates and the Market for New Light Motor Vehicles" (with Adam Copeland and Louis Maccini), Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 51, Issue 5, August 2019, pp. 1137-1168.

• For a non-technical summary, see "End of the Road? Impact of Interest Rate Changes on the Automobile Market" (with Adam Copeland and Louis Maccini), Liberty Street Economics, November 23, 2015

• Appendices
  

"Brief History of US Debt Limits Before 1939 " (with Thomas Sargent), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115, No. 12, March 2018, pp. 2942-2945.

"Fiscal Discrimination in Three Wars " (with Thomas Sargent), Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 61, January 2014, pp. 148-166.

• For an example of fiscal discrimination today, see "Fiscal prioritisation: Lessons from three wars" (with Thomas Sargent), VOX, May 19, 2013.

"A Dynamic Model of Price Discrimination and Inventory Management at the Fulton Fish Market" (with Kathryn Graddy), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 80, No. 1, September 2011, pp. 6-19.

"Interest Rate Risk and Other Determinants of Post WW-II U.S. Government Debt/GDP Dynamics" (with Thomas Sargent), American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 2011, pp. 192-214. [web appendix] [data and Matlab code]

• For a non-technical summary, see the Global Finance Brief, "How Will We Pay Down the Bush-Obama Debt? Lessons from the Last 60 Years" Rosenberg Institute of Global Finance, Spring 2010.


• A comparison of our interest payment series to the Treasury's is made in "Net interest payments on the federal debt: A flawed measure" (with Thomas Sargent), VOX, February 17, 2010.

"Inventories and the Automobile Market" (with Adam Copeland and Wendy Dunn), RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 121-149.

"The Response of Prices, Sales, and Output to Temporary Changes in Demand" (with Adam Copeland), Journal of Applied Econometrics , Vol. 26, No. 2, March 2011, pp. 232-269.

"The (S,s) Rule is an Optimal Trading Strategy in a Class of Commodity Price Speculation Problems" (with John Rust), Economic Theory, Vol. 30, No. 3, March 2007, pp. 515-538.

"Exchange Rates and Casualties During the First World War" Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 51, No. 8, November 2004, pp. 1711-1742.

• Exchange Rates Data Files [pdf file] [ASCII file]

"Middle Men versus Market Makers: A Theory of Competitive Exchange" (with John Rust), Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 111, No. 2, April 2003, pp. 353-403.

"The Tax Smoothing Implications of the Federal Debt Paydown" (with Stefan Krieger), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 31, 2000:2, pp. 253-302.

"Non-Convex Costs and Capital Utilization: A Study of Production Scheduling at Automobile Assembly Plants" Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 45, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 681-716.

"An Empirical Model of Inventory Investment by Durable Commodity Intermediaries" (with John Rust)
[postscript file] [pdf file] Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Vol. 52, No. 1, June 2000, pp. 171-214.

"Accounting for the Federal Government's Cost of Funds" (with Thomas J. Sargent) Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Economic Perspectives, July/August 1997, pp. 18-28.

"Overtime, Effort, and the Propagation of Business Cycle Shocks" Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 38, No. 1, August 1996, pp. 139-160.