Abstract
During the 1930s, a number of economists, politicians, and business reformers claimed that industrial concentration, a decline in competition, and failure of the price system explained the length and severity of the depression. The core of these explanations was the administered-price doctrine—the notion that prices in concentrated industries are rigid when demand decreases; but they linked the depression to monopoly in other ways, too. These interpretations of the Great Depression produced a wide range of proposals about regulating economic activity, and they led to a vast study of concentration of economic power by the Temporary National Economic Committee. Overall, the idea was to promote economic recovery by correcting market failures that resulted from declining competition. Among economists who held other explanations of the depression, few questioned whether some kind of reform was desirable; it was widely believed that markets were riddled with imperfections and monopoly conditions that could be improved by appropriate regulatory policies.
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Cox, C.C. (1981). Monopoly Explanations of the Great Depression and Public Policies Toward Business. In: Brunner, K. (eds) The Great Depression Revisited. Rochester Studies in Economics and Policy Issues, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8135-5_9
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