This paper studies a scenario - one of the six problems with Austrian Business Cycle theory raised by Hummel (1979) - that the ABCT literature has paid little attention. Will a constant rate of credit expansion necessarily lead to a boom-bust cycle? We conclude that this scenario has two...

The conventional version of Austrian business cycle theory focuses on a temporary imbalance between natural and monetary rates of interest. When, because of the role of monetary authorities in defining the monetary rate, the two values are in a situation of imbalance, the resulting expansion...

The ABCT is a description of the boom and bust of an economy following a reduction in the banks' interest rate to a level below the equilibrium or natural rate. While descriptions of the theory emphasize the imbalance between consumption and investment that ensues the artificial decrease in the...

Salter and Luther (2016) argue that the Austrian theory of the business cycle (ABCT) can be interpreted as one where consumers and entrepreneurs with rational expectations make erroneous investment decisions driven by misperceptions regarding real vs. nominal shocks. Although we are sympathetic...

This study investigates the behaviour of the interest rate over the business cycle that is predicted by the Austrian theory of economic fluctuations. The first part briefly introduces the Austrian approach and develops some of its basic tools. The second part focuses on the gap between the...

The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek developed a unique theory of the business cycle. In their view, an unsustainable boom ensues when the rate of interest prevailing in the market falls below the natural rate. The boom is characterized not only by an increase in...

The 100%-Money Plan advocated by Fisher (1936) has a Misesian flavor as it aims at mitigating intertemporal discoordination by reducing (i) the discrepancy between investment and voluntary savings, and (ii) the manipulation of interest rates by monetary injections. Recent proposals to adopt the...

Ludwig von Mises considered immediate overconsumption essential to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT); Friedrich Hayek never agreed. Examining this disagreement, Roger Garrison concluded that Hayek's exposition of ABCT (a stages-of-production framing without immediate overconsumption)...

Austrian economists have contributed several important concepts to business cycle theory including: inter-temporal coordination of production and consumption, heterogeneous specificity of capital, nonneutrality of money, and the capital structure of production. Noticeably lacking, however, is a...

F.A. Hayek's trade cycle theory was triumphant in the early 1930s, but withered within a decade as critics went unanswered. Hayek challenged others to “prove” theoretically, what he “knew” intuitively about business cycles. In the late 1990s, Roger Garrison responded with a logically...