To date, the history of financial economics has not discussed in detail the international diffusion of financial economics (henceforth modern finance). Modern finance was supposedly “introduced” in France in the 1970s. According to some historians of financial economics, it is an American...

To date, little research has documented the international diffusion of financial economics. Financial economics was supposedly “introduced” in France in the 1970s. Some analysts have argued that it is an American author — Leonard J. Savage — who allowed French authors to rediscover Louis...

The term “Say’s Law” was introduced in the twentieth century by an American economist, Fred Manville Taylor. To this date, no research has thoroughly investigated how the term came to be and what it really meant in Taylor’s writings. This paper aims to examine how Taylor defined and used...

James Ahiakpor argues that our “claim that Say changed his mind on his law of markets or outlets in the fifth and sixth editions [of the Treatise]…is misleading.” We disagree emphatically with Ahiakpor’s characterizations. His note is full of errors and misrepresentations. In order to...

This article examines the railway concessions in France in the 19th century as examples of a principal-agent relationship between the State and a contractor. I show that one of the main assumptions of the agency theory, the asymmetric information at the benefit of the agent, is not verified. I...

The common narrative about Jean-Baptiste Say's treatment of money holdings is that he denied the possibility of hoarding. I show that this interpretation of Say's thinking is erroneous. Drawing upon the various editions of Traité and Cours and other lesser-known texts, I provide substantial...

Cournot’s views on the effects of international trade on social income have received little attention. Drawing upon a comprehensive analysis of Cournot’s writings, we show that Cournot distinguished between variations in nominal income and variations in real income. He introduced the...

J.S. Mill is generally considered to be the theorist who gave birth to the concept of natural monopoly in its modern sense. Yet, no author has specified that Mill distinguishes two types of monopoly, the ?natural monopoly? and the ?practical monopoly?. I show that Mill?s notion of ?practical...