Peter Howitt is best known for his contributions to growth theory, but his work in short- run economics, which began with his Ph.D thesis and still continues, is important and deserves attention. It lies firmly in the Keynesian macro-disequilibrium tradition of Clower and Leijonhufvud, and for a...

Modern mainstream macroeconomics treats the economy 'as if' always in equilibrium. Two older traditions, Monetarism and the Wicksell Connections have always dissented, arguing that how agents gather information and apply it to the co-ordination of their activities are prior problems requiring...

The History of Economics Society was founded at a time when the History of Economic Thought was being expelled from the Economics post-graduate curriculum in many universities, and was one of the key institutions around which the sub-discipline successfully re-organised itself and continued to...

Friedman's Presidential Address was about "The Role of Monetary Policy". Its famous discussion of inflation-unemployment inter-relationships was subservient to this broader topic. The program it promoted influenced monetary policy in the '70s and early '80s with mixed results, but enough of it...

Lucas (1972) was a paper that permanently changed the course of macroeconomics, even though its "money supply surprise" model lost its central place in the area within a decade because of empirical difficulties. However, Lucas's novel methodology, based on clearing markets and rational...

[...] It would not be fair to Skidelsky to pile up a longer list of infelicities of this sort. He is primarily an historian who has had to learn economics more or less from scratch in order to write a biography of a great economist who was much else besides. It is unreasonable to expect him to...

This paper surveys the literature of the Bullionist controversy which dominated the development of Classical monetary economics between 1797 and the early 1820s. It highlights the contributions of Henry Thornton to the early phase of the debate, particularly his refutation of the Real Bill...

Today' standard model of monetary policy has aggregate demand responding directly to an interest rate under the central bank's control, and ignores the role played by the quantity of money in the transmission mechanism. Even though monetary policy is usually aimed at controlling price level...

Recent financial instability has called into question the sufficiency of low inflation as a goal for monetary policy. This paper discusses interwar literature bearing on this question. It begins with theories of the cycle based on the quantity theory, and their policy prescription of price...

This paper traces the evolution of debate about the question of Rules versus Discretion in monetary policy from about 1800 until the mid 1930s. Particular attention is paid to long-versus-short-run issues, notably with respect to the 1844 Bank Charter Act, and the Bagehot Principle, as well as...