Business Cycles : Volume I : The Problem and Its Setting
New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1936.
Later Printing. Hardcover. Good+ with no dust jacket. Item #15168
Pencil UNDERLINING on some pages, notes on front free endpaper, 1938 owner's signature, otherwise light wear. Solid hardcover. ; Classic of economic thought, parsing the varied possible factors, theories, and empirical data that could explain business cycles. "The best framework for a discussionof how business cycles run their course is that provided by the phases of these cycles - prosperity, recession, depression, and revival. Our collections of business annals and of theories lend themselves readily to this plan; for the annals mark changes in the tieds of activity, and most current theories explain crises by what happens in prosperity and revivals by what happens in depression. But statistical time series are continuous. How shall we break them into parts for use in a discussion that treats first all periods of prosperity as a unit, then all periods of recession, and so on? ... we plan to analyze all the time series for a given country on the basis of a standard pattern derived from the business annals of that country, not on the basis of the various patterns which might be derived from study of the several series themselves. In most cases we anticipate that the cycles and phases of the individual series will correspond fairly well with the standard patterns of the countries from which they come. But there will be cases of notable divergence in timing - cases which our plan will throw into high relief, and from which we shall learn much of interest." - page 472. 1936 preface notes that "Inasmuch as the National Bureau hopes to publish a second volume of this treatise at no distant date it seems time to place the words Volume I upon the title page." 1936 printing of Mitchell's ground-breaking 1927 work to define empirical tools to study business cycles, a completely new rewrite, rather than a revision, of his 1913 first book on business cycles. ; xxii, 489 pages.
Price: $69.95