I estimate discount rates for 73 students across three sections of Principles of Macroeconomics at Kenyon College in the Spring 2015 semester. I find that a representative student with a discount rate one standard deviation above the mean earns roughly 2.28 fewer percentage points in the course...

What does an ideal base money look like? I maintain that it is (1) stable, (2) demand-elastic, (3) global, and (4) incentive-compatible. I conclude that, since most real world monies fall short of the ideal on one margin or another, one must consider the trade offs when ranking the available...

Friedrich Hayek is often credited with the resurgence of interest in alternative monetary systems. His own proposal, however, received sharp criticism from Milton Friedman, Stanley Fischer, and others at the outset and never gained much support among academic economists or the wider population....

The case of the Somali shilling defies the historical view that sovereign powers (i.e., legal tender status, public receivability) are necessary to explain the acceptance of fiat money at a positive value. Following the Somali state’s collapse in 1991, irredeemable paper shillings have...

The Great Recession seems to be creating a change in the trend of macroeconomic thinking. Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models dominated the macroeconomics literature without any apparent challengers on the horizon. Since then, however, we...

An island nation in north-western Europe, the Republic of Ireland is one of the highest income countries in the world. According to the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, Ireland is among the ten wealthiest countries in the world as measured by gross domestic...

The authors offer perspective on the world financial crisis. Specifically, they claim it was a perfect storm of policy errors that caused the housing bubble and then perpetuated the recovery period into an over-extended recession

Lester and Wolff (2013) find little empirical support for the Austrian business cycle theory. According to their analysis, an unexpected monetary shock does not alter the structure of production in a way consistent with the Austrian view. Rather than increasing production in early and late...