Abstract: In Hayek's early writings on business cycle theory and the Great Depression he argued that business cycle downturns including the steep downturn of 1929-31 were caused by unsustainable elongations of capital structure of the economy resulting from bank-financed investment in excess of...

Abstract: Drawing on McCraw's (2007) biography, this paper assesses the character of Joseph Schumpeter. After a biographical summary of Schumpeter's life and career as an economist, the paper considers a thread of deliberate posturing and pretense in Schumpeter's grandiose ambitions and claims...

Despite all the commentary that the topic has attracted in recent years, confusion still surrounds the proper definition of relevant markets in antitrust. This paper addresses that confusion and attempts to explain the underlying logic of market definition. It does so largely by way of...

This paper uses the Fisher equation relating the nominal interest rate to the real interest rate and expected inflation to provide a deeper explanation of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recovery than attributing it to the bursting of the housing-price bubble. The paper...

This paper reviews and evaluates some of the reasons commonly advanced to explain why the production of money is a natural monopoly. Some these reasons are actually not strict natural monopoly explanations but are instead claims that the production or use of money involves some type of...

Say's Law occupies a prominent, but equivocal, position in the history of economics, having been the object of repeated controversies about its meaning and significance since it was first propounded early in the nineteenth century. It has been variously defined, and arguments about its meaning...

Hayek was among the first to realize that for intertemporal equilibrium to obtain all agents must have correct expectations of future prices. Before comparing four categories of intertemporal, the paper explains Hayek's distinction between correct expectations and perfect foresight. The four...