The poet Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) was a moralist who regarded economics as key to understanding human society, and thereby to solve most social problems. He became a prolific writer of economic texts, in which he espoused the ideas of two heretic economists: Major Clifford Douglas’ social...

Mihail Manoilescu was one of the main intellectual personalities of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and a central banker, but also as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s till the end of his...

This paper analyses exchange rate control measures adopted in Italy and Bulgaria during the interwar period. The first two sections provide a detailed account of the institutional and economic framework in which these measures were enforced and interpret them utilizing statistical data. In the...

In this paper we present one possible historical reconstruction of the German historical school in Bulgaria for the period 1878 – 1944. The main postulates of the historical school which claimed to be a general theoretical model for newly emerging and backward economies suited well the...

Frank Knight was the key person in founding the Chicago school of economics. In this respect he was a seminal figure in the history of twentieth century economics. Yet, few current economists know much about Knight. After his early success in 1921 with Risk, Uncertainty and Profit - Knight's...

In this paper, we show that, in 1961 and before he had read "The Problem of Social Cost", Calabresi reached exactly the same conclusions as the one reached by Coase and summarized by Stigler as the "Coase theorem" but he believed that this result was valid only in the theoretical world of the...

Meir Kohn’s Exchange and Value claims that economics can be characterised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterise the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as “law and economics”. We compare and...

In 1940 Schumpeter wrote a paper entitled: “The Meaning of Rationality in the Social Sciences”, which was intended to one of the meetings of a seminar including Talcott Parsons, Wassilly Léontief, Paul Sweezy and other Harvard scholars, that he took the initiative to start. In this paper...

In one of the most famous passages of economic literature, John Maynard Keynes (1936, p.156) likens the stock market to a beauty contest in which the winners are those who anticipate the average opinion. Recently there have been attempts at investigating the BC experimentally (Nagel 1995, Duffy...

The 1870s have always held a special attraction for specialists in the history of thought. For economic theory these are the years of the Great Crossroads when economic theory was at critical breaking point, after which several powerful theoretical streams emerged that were to determine later on...