<title>Abstract</title> The article discusses how early economists, sometimes informed by the pioneer report on a Latin American country (Mexico) by the geographer A. von Humboldt, interpreted the connections between natural resources, institutions and growth. The paradox of a negative relation between natural...

<title>Abstract</title> The paper offers a reconstruction of the ‘conversation’ between Irving Fisher and Knut Wicksell on money as shown by references they made to each other's works. The first phase corresponded largely to the period between 1897 and 1911, when they proposed different explanations of the...

This paper is a response to Michel De Vroey's review of our book, published in this issue of EJHET. Differently from De Vroey's, our aim is to understand the theoretical choices with which economists believed they were confronted at the time. This is reflected in the organisation of our book,...

The article discusses Wicksell's assessment of the controversy between Bohm-Bawerk on one side, and Fisher and Bortkiewicz on the other, on the role of productivity (the 'third reason') in the determination of the rate of interest. It is shown that in the process of arguing out the third reason...

This is an introduction to a selection of papers on early contributions to quantitative business cycle theory. The papers, originally presented at a conference in Antwerp in September 2005, are written by Edmond Malinvaud, Olav Bjerkholt, Mauro Boianovsky and Hans-Michael Trautwein, Robert W....

The article provides an account of the debate that took place between the late 1920s and the mid 1930s between the Scandinavian economists Johan Åkerman and Ragnar Frisch about the quantitative treatment of aggregate economic fluctuations. Although both interpreted the business cycle as an...

The paper provides an account of Don Patinkin's long-time search for an explanation of the notions of an aggregate demand constraint and unemployment under the assumption of a perfectly competitive goods market. It is argued that Patinkin's quest is reflected on the development of the concept of...

The paper brings to light an early contribution to the cash-in-advance literature made by the Brazilian economist Mario Henrique Simonsen (1935-1997) in an article written in Portuguese as far back as 1964. Simonsen explicitly introduced the cash-in-advance constraint as an inequality in a...