Hayek's evolving thought on gold and the gold standard is complex and, at times, confusing. Hayek initially supported the gold standard and paid special attention to those nations whose central banking policies he viewed as relatively loose. Early on he viewed attempts at stabilization of...

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ spectacular rise over the past years has attracted considerable public and academic interest. The important question arising in this context is whether cryptocurrencies can legitimately be regarded as money. This paper contributes to the current discourse by...

Challenging the dominant view, we claim that Hayek's monetary views did not significantly change over his lifetime. The prevalent perception of early Hayek as a money stream stabilizer and late Hayek as a price level stabilizer is attributable to an unjustified normative interpretation of...

In 2008 the global financial system suffered a catastrophic collapse. The question ‘why did it happen?' has rightly been foremost in the minds of many writers since but this paper seeks to approach the problem from a different angle. The dominant paradigm in economics was, and amazingly still...

The economic works of Johann Heinrich von Thünen include 1,000 unpublished pages of drafts and notes on the basis of which he prepared the second volume of his famous “Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy”. Thünen wrote his texts in the so-called Deutsche...

Wicksell's formulation of monetary theory as the study of the relation between aggregate supply and aggregate demand – and their respective division into supply of consumption and capital goods on one side, and income spent and saved, on the other – would play a key role in the development...

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...

What role does government play in determining the medium of exchange? Economists weighing in on the issue typically espouse one of two views. State theorists credit government with the emergence and continued acceptance of commonly accepted media of exchange. In contrast, spontaneous order...

The concept of neutral money plays a central role in contemporary macroeconomic theory as an implication of the “classical dichotomy” and is also very much a live issue in recent monetary policy discussion revolving around the notion of a “neutral interest rate.” Modern scholars...