PHILADELPHIA — Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the current United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus or not enough, or because slower growth had become the norm even before the recession.

But maybe these arguments share a faulty premise.

The American economy is actually doing reasonably well — at least compared with what would be expected after a major financial crisis — according to a provocative study from Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Harvard economists and financial crisis historians whose work has been attacked and embraced by the political right and left.

The study, presented over the weekend at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, rejects comparisons with regular postwar American recoveries, as other economists have made, and instead examines 100 major, or “systemic,” financial crises that have occurred over the last two centuries, in the United States and abroad.

It found that relative to previous American financial crises, the current economy is doing substantially better. Across nine major financial crises in the United States, the average peak-to-trough decline in inflation-adjusted per-capita gross domestic product is about 9 percent, and it has taken an average of 6.7 years to recover to the precrisis peak. During the years after crises, five of the nine episodes also had a “double-dip” downturn.