We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID-19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending...

Steven Horwitz's book, Micro-foundations and Macroeconomics has been at the center of the post-crisis revival of Austrian business cycle theory. Much of the work that has been done on this topic has either extended or refined Horwitz's framework. This paper's aim is more modest. In it, I apply...

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that...

Between 1794 and 1796, France experienced an unprecedented hyperinflation fueled by an explosion of paper money called the assignat. In September 1795, the French adopted the Constitution of Year III, which we use to demonstrate how changes in the "rules of the game" and in the "political...

Economists have long recognized the need for durability-enhancing mechanisms to facilitate political exchange, but the focus has been almost entirely on mechanisms that raise the cost of reneging on bargains once they have been struck. What happens if these mechanisms fail? This paper argues...

How much independence should the monetary authority retain in a rules-based regime? The conventional wisdom holds that while the political system - particularly in a democratic society - should determine the overarching goal of monetary policy, the central bank should remain free to select...

The gold standard is back in the news following a series of announcements from the Trump Administration indicating that the President was considering candidates for the open positions on the Federal Reserve Board who are sympathetic to the idea of restoring the gold standard. The prospect of...

During the colonial era, the French colonial government in Canada experimented with paper money printed on the back of playing cards. The first experiment lasted from 1685 to 1719. In the first years, there was little inflation in spite of a rapidly expanding stock of playing card money. It is...

Economic historians remain divided over America’s experiment with free banking during the antebellum era. Some argue that the reforms, which liberalized the bank-chartering process, simply exchanged one set of entry barriers for another, while others hold that free banking improved competition...

In this paper, we analyze the e ect that alternative decision-making structures have on equilibrium in ation rates. Our analysis considers four scenarios: strong dictatorship, weak dictatorship, strong democracy and weak democracy. Each scenario implies different ownership structures over the...