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Uncontrolled Land Development and the Duration of the Depression in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Alexander James Field
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053.

Abstract

Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continuing obstacles to recovery during the second half of the 1930s.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1992

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