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...

Douglass North earned a share of the 1993 Nobel prize for economics for two decades of research that culminated in the development of an innovative framework for analyzing economic history. This review essay discusses the book that most comprehensively presents North's paradigm, which...