James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and the question of how much normativity public choice can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between public choice and German ordoliberalism (and its source...

Wicksell discussed in his 1893 book Value, capital and rent, as part of a critical comment on Launhardt and Jevons, conditions for consistent aggregation. He argued that Jevons’s trading body concept was only valid if identical linear marginal utility functions (with ensuing parallel Engel...

The notion of solution plays a crucial role in the conceptual system of Léon Walras, the founder of General Equilibrium Theory (GET). In this paper, after introducing the two solution concepts employed by Walras in the development of his version of GET, respectively called the "theoretical" and...

Walras' theory of general economic equilibrium undergoes deep changes over the twenty-six years elapsing from the date when Walras' first significant theoretical contribution is published (1874) and the date when the fourth edition of his fundamental work, the Eléments d'économie politique...

The article shows Frederic Bastiat as one of the main advocates of individual freedom and an ardent opponent of the enforced action of a centralized State. He lived in the epoch of liberal ideas put into practice. As the free market and the laissez-faire principle had brought about difficult...

After briefly reconstructing the debate in Italy during the period of the marginalist revolution on the correct methodology for the history of economic thought, the article examines De Viti de Marco's position. A historical essay of his (1891) on Antonio Serra (1613), becomes the first object of...

This paper examines Alfred Marshall's theory of organization and business management, and explores the significance of his wisdom and foresight. Despite considerable research on Alfred Marshall’s economic theory, little attention, among economists in particular, has been given to his theory of...

The paper brings to light an article by Knut Wicksell published in Swedish in 1908 about the American crisis of 1907. Wicksell explicitly distinguished, apparently for the first time in the literature, three features of a healthy banking system: Solvency, liquidity, and versatility. The paper...

James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and the question of how much normativity public choice can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between public choice and German ordoliberalism (and its source...

The natural rate of interest is a ubiquitous latent variable in economics and finance. Recent estimates display a declining path during the last three to four decades including, in some cases, negative values. Such declining trend in estimates of the natural rate of interest evinces in...