Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

This paper distinguishes two kinds of Endogenous Business Cycle models; EBC1 models, which display dynamic indeterminacy, and EBC2 models, which display steady-state indeterminacy. Both strands of the literature have their origins in the sunspot literature that developed at the University of...

A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide...

We highlight the elements of the operation of the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund that Harry Dexter White, who directed the Treasury's division of monetary research, transferred to his plan for the operation of the International Monetary Fund. The elements included the principle that all...

This paper argues that the modern stochastic consumption model, in which impatient consumers face uninsurable labor income risk, matches Milton Friedman's (1957) original description of the Permanent Income Hypothesis much better than the perfect foresight or certainty equivalent models did. The...

Economists have long recognized that total factor productivity is an important factor in the process of economic growth. However, just how important it is has been a matter of ongoing controversy. Part of this controversy is about methods and assumptions. Total factor productivity growth is...

The paper considers ways of avoiding a liquidity trap and ways of getting out of one. Unless lower short nominal interest rates are associated with significantly lower interest volatility, a lower average rate of inflation, which will be associated with lower expected nominal interest rates,...

We analyze the effect of inflation on the average output of monopolistic firms facing a small fixed cost of changing nominal prices. Using Taylor expansions, we derive a general closed-form solution for the slope of the long-run Phillips curve. This very simple, unifying formula allows us to...

The answer to the question in the title is: A lot. In this essay, I argue that the history of macroeconomics during the 20th century can be divided in three epochs: Pre 1940. A period of exploration, where macroeconomics was not macroeconomics yet, but monetary theory on one side, business cycle...

This paper explores some of the scholarship that influenced Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's "A Monetary History". It shows that the ideas of several Chicago economists -- Henry Schultz, Henry Simons, Lloyd Mints, and Jacob Viner -- left clear marks. It argues, however, that the most...