Past, Present and Policy: 4th International Conference
The Sub-prime Crisis and How it Changed the Past
Geneva, Graduate Institute, Geneva 3-4 February 2011
Partnership with the Bank of Norway

As the sub-prime crisis has amplified, economic historians have been in high demand. Comparisons and parallels with the 1929 crisis have dominated many policy discussions. However, for economic historians the most important and policy-relevant implication of the crisis is the extent to which it has affected earlier wisdom regarding what ought to be done to deal with major crises. Many of our current policy prescriptions have been shaped as a response to the interwar crisis – yet it remains to be seen whether they can fly. At the end of the day both the present and the past will no longer be what they used to.

On behalf the organisers of PPP4 (Marc Flandreau, Graduate Institute, Geneva and CEPR, Øyvind Eitrheim and Jan F. Qvigstad, Norges Bank), and of the PPP steering committee, we are writing to invite submissions of papers or expressions of interest in attending the launch of the fourth Economic History panel: Past, Present, and Policy, to be hosted by the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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