This directory contains files used for ``Accounting for the Great Depression'' American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings May 2002 by V.V. Chari, Patrick Kehoe, and Ellen McGrattan The appendix describes the computations done in the main codes: wedges.m Matlab code that generates wedges aea.f90 Fortran code that computes equilibria aeasim.m Fortran code that compares data with model The file used to generate Figure 1 in the paper is wedges.m. Look at the last figure plotted after running it in Matlab. I should note that some versions of Matlab may require some editing of the code wedges.m because they give different names to the data being loaded than my version. For example, the code has "load nipa/605a" which loads in the file 605a in the subdirectory nipa. My version of matlab names it X605a because the first character of the name is numeric. Other versions use the naming convention: nipa_605a. The specific input files for aea.f90 that generated the results in the paper are aea.inp.*, with *=a, taun,all, and taux. Copy each to aea.inp (which is called by aea.f90) and compile aea.f90 along with qgausl.f and uni.f. The command I use is in file comp (where pgf90 is the compiler, -r8 and -fast are options for real*8 and optimization, a.out is the name of the executable, aea.f90 is the main routine, qgausl.f and uni.f are subroutines, and lapack and blas are necessary libraries. Standard math Fortran libaries include lapack and blas routines. If yours does not, the source code is free and can be obtained via ftp. (See, for example, http://www.netlib.org/lapack and http://www.netlib.org/blas.) To generate Figures 2-4 in the paper, run aeasim.m after compiling and running aea.f90. The output of aea.f90 is the input of aeasim.m. Data used in the project are located in subdirectories ./nipa ./labor Files for my UM8313 class are located in ./um8313 The students were given countries simulated from the Fortran codes and asked to determine the sources of fluctuations -- during normal times and during times of depression. The results of the experiments are summarized in countries.txt. What the students discovered is intuition can get you only so far. What I found interesting about the particular experiments that we did is this: the students oftentimes assumed that changes in investment or capital tax rates were the source of fluctuations -- even when they were fixed at a constant rate. Ellen McGrattan May 2002