This paper presents a monetary explanation the US recession of 1797. Credit expansion initiated by Bank of the United States in the early 1790s unleashed a bout of inflation and low real interest rates which spurred a speculative investment bubble in real estate and capital intensive...

This paper compares estimates of the resource costs of monetary gold accumulation under the classical (1880-1914) gold standard with estimates of the resource costs associated with gold “investment” in the post-Bretton Woods era (1972-present) for the United States. While the costs...

This paper investigates the six textbooks most commonly adopted in U.S. undergraduate money and banking courses for how they describe the influences that commercial banks and central banks have on macroeconomic stability. We examine seven topics: (1) the inherent stability of banks, bank runs,...

This paper criticizes the treatment of externalities presented in modern undergraduate economic textbooks. Despite a tremendous scholarly push-back since 1920 to Pigou's path-breaking writings, modern textbook authors fail to synthesize important critiques and extensions of externality theory...