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Understanding the American stock market boom and bust of the 1920s is vital for formulating policies to combat the potentially deleterious effects of busts on the economy. Using new data, Kabiri explains what led to the 1920s stock market boom and 1929 crash and looks at whether 1929 was a bubble or not and whether it could have been anticipated.

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1. Introduction 2. Literature Review and Methodology 3. The US Economy and the Financial System 4. The Returns to US Common Stocks from 1871 - 2010 5. The October Crash of 1929 and the NYSE Credit System 6. The Great Contraction 1929 - 1933 and the Value of Stocks 7. Conclusions

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"Kabiri´s book provides a synthesis of the debates on the 1929 crash but also a new set of tests built on both existing and newly collected data to understand which forces drove the stock market to levels reached in the 1920s ... . book contributes to behavioral economics, estimating the rationality of the rise and fall in stock prices during the boom and bust as well as to history of economic thought, detailing financial theories and methods of the 1920s." (Rapha‰l Hekimian, EH Net, eh.net, August, 2015)

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Ali Kabiri is a research associate at the Financial Markets Group at the LSE and a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Buckingham, UK. He has been a visiting research scholar at Columbia Business School and Yale University in the USA.

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