During the past 200 years, most countries have entered a period of modern economic growth-consistent increases in output, input, and productivity per worker that were rare in previous centuries. Even so, a few regions of the world have experienced stagnant or falling living standards in recent...

As the current expansion nears its eighth anniversary, it becomes tempting to wonder whether the second-longest expansion in U.S. economic history is nearing an end. The only U.S expansion to last longer was a nearly nine-year expansion that occurred during the Vietnam War. Thus, the current...

The concept of a new Industrial Revolution has recently become of great interest to general economists of all persuasions. For example, the New Growth Theory has placed renewed emphasis on the importance of technological change in modern economic growth, and a number of authors have suggested...

Banks in the United States issued currency with no oversight of any kind by the federal goverment from 1837 to 1865. Many of these banks were part of "free banking" systems with no discretionary approval of entry into banking, and these banks issued notes that were used for payments in...

Contrary to the strawman “classical” model of the textbooks, the original classical economists did not believe that money-stock changes affect only the price level and not real output and employment. Most classicals saw money as having powerful short-run real effects and perhaps some...

From Irving Fisher in 1907 to Jan Tinbergen in 1945 at least eight economists developed the famous diagram used to demonstrate the gains from international trade.

Despite their image as free traders, six leading British classical and neoclassical economists formulated a valid theoretical argument for tariffs. They showed that a suitably small tariff could, under certain conditions, benefit the levying country by improving its terms of trade. They also...

Henry Thornton’s Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) established once and for all the notion that central banks have the prime responsibility for controlling the money stock and the price level. This theme and the analytical framework underlying it reappeared in the famous Bullion Report...