Abstract. Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among the differing new interpretations, the real business cycle (RBC) approach is particularly significant. It represents an outstanding methodological innovation in trying to cast the Great Depression within an 'equilibrium' framework. This paper critically reviews the RBC interpretation of the Great Depression, clarifying its theoretical and methodological foundations, and paving the way for future assessments of its validity.

We build a general equilibrium model in which both illegal immigration and the size of the informal sector are endogenously determined and interact in a non-trivial way. We show that policy measures such as tax reduction and detection of informal activities can be used as substitutes for border enforcement, in order to contrast illegal immigration. In our framework, a welfare-maximising Government will never choose to drive illegal immigration to zero, but will set the tax rate to a lower value if it includes illegal immigration in its objective function.

We provide a theory that is able to account for the observed comovement between the shift in intergenerational living arrangements from coresidence to non-coresidence and economic development. Our theory is consistent with the diminution in the status of the elderly documented by some sociologists. The results from our analysis show that, when technical progress is fast enough, the economy experiences a shift from stagnation to growth, there is a transition from coresidence to non-coresidence, and the social status of the elderly tends to deteriorate.

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We show that the structural change of the economy from agriculture to industry was a major determinant of the observed shift in intergenerational coresidence. We build a two-sector overlapping generation model of the structural change out of agriculture, in which the coresidence choice is endogenous. We calibrate the model on US data and simulate it. The model can match well the decline in US intergenerational coresidence between 1870 and 1940.