This paper deals with Maffeo Pantaleoni's (1857-1924) analysis of money and banking and aims at demonstrating that the Italian economist developed one and the same theory for both institutions, whose central feature was the notion of flexibility and whose main claim was that the most important...

The paper draws on Siegel (1984) to argue that, while paving the way for constitutionalizing the free market in Lochner v. New York (1905), the reproduction cost method that the Supreme Court established in Smyth v. Ames (1898) as the preferred technique for assessing the “fair value” of a...

The paper deals with the mysterious persistence of the Chicago approach as the main analytical engine driving antitrust enforcement in the US. While the approach has been almost completely replaced in contemporary industrial economics by the so-called Post-Chicago view, with its superior...

The paper presents three different reconstructions of the 1980s boom of game theory and its rise to the present status of indispensable tool-box for modern economics. The first story focuses on the Nash refinements literature and on the development of Bayesian games. The second emphasizes the...

The goal of the paper is to investigate the extent of the influence of American antitrust tradition on the foundation and early years of European competition policy. This as part of a wider research program aiming at assessing the role of economic theory in the development of antitrust law and...

As the embodiment of classical competition, freedom of contract was still a fundamental notion for the American economists of the Gilded Age. For this reason, it played a key role in the controversies about competition and regulation that agitated the US legal and political landscape between...

This short essay reviews Thomas Leonard's extraordinary book, Illiberal Reformers (Princeton UP, 2016) and at the same time critically discusses the review of the same book recently published in the Journal of Economic Literature. It is argued that the JEL reviewers have grossly misinterpreted...

The goal of the paper is to investigate the extent of the influence of American antitrust tradition on the foundation and early years of European competition policy. This as part of a wider research program aiming at assessing the role of economic theory in the development of antitrust law and...

It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890-1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or...

The controversy over railroad rates regulation represented a fundamental component of the jurisprudential trajectory that, culminating in Lochner v. New York, led to the era of so-called laissez faire constitutionalism. Constitutional protection of property required that regulation be such as to...