In this paper we import a mainstream psycholgical theory, known as attachment theory, into economics and show the implications of this theory for economic behavior by individuals in the ultimatum bargaining game. Attachment theory examines the psychological tendency to seek proximity to another...

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank...

There is a consensus among the majority of economists that the credit supply is limited by current household saving. If governments or foreigners ran deficits, they would absorb this limited saving so that firms could not borrow any longer and had to reduce their investment. This is the...

In Canada, targeting the inflation rate was intended as a temporary measure on a journey to price-level stability, but became a well-established monetary policy regime in its own right. This paper analyses the role of the interaction of economic ideas with the experience generated by their...

Liquidity preference theory had a hard time to defeat the loanable funds approach because Keynes himself failed to elucidate the financing of investment in the General Theory. Liquidity preference is a key element in the credit supply decision of the banking system. Liquidity premium is an...

During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" -- because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others -- and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to the paper...

In the paper I offer some vignettes on my relationship, both professional and personal, with Mark Blaug, and by way of example reflect on his impact on the history of economics.