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This article presents several research papers related to banks and asset markets during war and depression. "The Great Banks' Depression: Deposit Withdrawals in the German Crisis of 1931," uses monthly balance-sheet data of all major German credit banks, and further analyze deposit withdrawals and bank failures in the German banking and currency crisis of 1931. "International Financial Crisis Contagion in the Interwar Period," examines international financial markets and the links between them using a newly hand-collected data set for more than 300 company stocks, encompassing weekly equity-market observations for 13 countries.

This article focuses on the 2004 Economic History Association Meetings. Some of the meetings are: War Will Get You There; Credit and Wealth Unterdenlinden; Civil Action; Bombs, Germs and Invaders; Managing Political Uncertainty; Institutions of Unequal Pay; Growth and Conflict; Economic History Society Annual Conference Call for Academic Papers.

Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power--revolution, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflict, and costly policy insulation--in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an "inefficiency condition" that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substantive interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actors' relative power (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]