We examine central monetary policy issues as identified in the United States popular press circa 1787. Rather than a study of the functioning of the colonial monetary system, we consider the thinking about the monetary system. Of particular interest is the use of (pseudo) moral arguments for and...

No individual in the history of public economics has been subject to more contentious discussion than Knut Wicksell – and perhaps no concept subjected to more diverse interpretation than Wicksell's unanimity rule. The story begins in 1896 with the publication of Wicksell's public finance...

Existing studies of how note-taking tools affect student learning typically find that students who choose to take notes on a computer perform worse on assessments than students who take notes on paper. To our knowledge, the literature has not disentangled whether this result is due to the...

In this paper, I consider the evolution of the meaning of “fiscal policy” as understood in the economics literature before the publication of Keynes's General Theory. Consideration of the evolving meaning of fiscal policy is preliminary to understanding both the rise of Macroeconomics and...

The career and contributions of Roy Blough (1901-2000) are considered as a case study of Wisconsin Institutionalism in government policy-making at mid-century. Faculty member at Cincinnati, Chicago and Columbia, editor of the National Tax Journal, director of the research division of the U.S....

After the existence of general equilibrium was proved in the early 1950s, the next decade brought applications of general-equilibrium theory to policy issues such as the welfare effects of tariffs and the incidence of the corporate income tax. By the 1970s, general-equilibrium theory was being...

Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we reflect on contemporary teaching of undergraduate comparative economic systems (CES). Using qualitative and quantitative measures, we consider how the field responded to the collapse by examining CES textbooks from the 1980s, 1990s,...

This study reports on the status of Comparative Economics Systems (CES) courses in the U.S. undergraduate economics curriculum. The treatment of CES topics in introductory courses is examined through a survey of standard textbooks; findings indicate that the education of American students is...

Institutionalism was the dominant approach to public finance prior to World War II, after which it was eclipsed by Pigouvianism and Keynesianism. This transition defined the career of Wisconsin's Harold M. Groves (1897-1969). Groves was a notable public finance economist, leading textbook...

The core of public economics traditionally addresses two situations of market failure: externalities and public goods. The desirability of government action in these cases hinges on decisions made in the revenue-expenditure process. How this process is envisioned can tell us quite a lot about...