Fisher and Wicksell on Money : A Reconstructed Conversation

The paper offers a reconstruction of the “conversation” between Irving Fisher and Knut Wicksell on money as shown by references they made to each other's works. The first phase corresponded largely to the period between 1897 and 1911, when they proposed different explanations of the interaction between interest and prices, and incorporated aspects of each other's approaches into their own respective frameworks. This was followed by Wicksell's extended criticism of Fisher's compensated dollar plan and his bewilderment at its apparent lack of relation with the quantity theory of money (1912-1919). Finally, especially after Wicksell's death, Fisher came to support a significant part of Wicksell's monetary policy proposals, particularly in connection with the Swedish stabilization experiment in the early 1930s. Fisher and Wicksel were both heirs of Böhm-Bawerk's interest theory, but interpreted and criticized the Austrian from different perspectives, which helps to explain the differences in their approaches to monetary dynamics