104/2012 Nicholas Crafts

This paper employs the concept of ‘defence news’ proposed by Ramey (2009) to develop a time series of shocks to UK defence spending in the interwar period at a quarterly frequency. ‘Defence news’ is the present value of changes to defence spending plans. Information on this is taken from contemporary sources, in particular, The Economist. The estimates in this paper can be used as an input to assessing the size of the fiscal multiplier in interwar Britain as in Crafts and Mills (2012).

Economic History