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...

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...

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...

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...

This review provides a brief summary description of the book and its eight chapters which review the history of and the history of thought about seigniorage. After the first two introductory chapters, the next four chapters analyze the conditions for optimal seigniorage for three ideal types of...

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...

The first monetary theory of the Great Depression is often credited to Milton Friedman. Advanced to counter the idea that the Great Depression resulted from inherent capitalistic instabilities, Friedman's theory attributed the Depression to policy mistakes by an inept Federal Reserve Board. More...

This chapter compares alternative explanations of the Great Depression: the Monetarist explanation of (Friedman and Schwartz,.A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Princeton University Press, 1963), the Austrian explanation of Hayek and (Robbins,.The Great Depression, Macmillan,...

While Hayek's Prices and Production established his reputation as a business-cycle theorist, Sraffa's 1932 review of the book helped turn professional opinion against him. A key criticism of Sraffa was that Hayek's conception of a natural rate of interest, reflecting only real relationships, was...