E. W. Kemmerer's contribution to the quantity theory of money

This paper aims at suggesting a new interpretation of Edwin Walter Kemmerer's quantity theory of money as it appears in his Money and Credit Instruments in Their Relation to General Prices (1903, PhD thesis; and 1907, first edition of the book). In that work, he proposes an equation to determine the price level as the ratio of its monetary and real determinants. The paper addresses Kemmerer's key question of how money and credit are related to general prices. Two directions are investigated. Firstly, I explain Kemmerer's quantity theory by means of his exchange equation and how his interpretation may have influenced Fisher's economic theory. Secondly, I consider his test of the quantity theory on the US economy and I show the empirical validity of his theory. It is argued here that both elements give a key contribution to finding a new interpretation of the deepest meaning of Kemmerer's approach to quantity theory.