Friedrich Hayek is often credited with the resurgence of interest in alternative monetary systems. His own proposal, however, received sharp criticism from Milton Friedman, Stanley Fischer, and others at the outset and never gained much support among academic economists or the wider population....

Nearly a half-century before the financial crisis of 2008, there was another time when reforming the world monetary system was on everyone’s lips and many academics and policy makers were developing and attempting to promote plans for its reconstruction before illiquidity, speculation and loss...

In 1969 Don Patinkin responded to a 1956 claim made by Milton Friedman concerning the 'oral tradition' at Chicago in the thirties and forties. Friedman's seemingly innocuous remark initiated a debate over an apparent characterisation of a school of thought rather than any specific theoretical or...

Pareto based his interpretation of business cycles on a disaggregated general equilibrium system with dynamics determined by frictions (or “inertia”). The present article investigates his interpretation of the motion of the economic aggregate, in the sense of the set of individual consumers...

This chapter summarizes the case for considering money as a legal institution. The Western liberal tradition, represented here by John Locke’s iconic account of money, describes money as an item that emerged from barter before the state existed. Considered as an historical practice, money is...

The present essay addresses the epistemic difficulties involved in achieving consensus with respect to the Hayek-Keynes debate. It is argued that the debate cannot be settled on the basis of the observable evidence; or, more precisely, that the empirical implications of the relevant theories are...

Clément Juglar is widely perceived nowadays as the pioneer of the theory of the business cycle, the one who developed in the early 1860s the view that economic life follows a rhytmical pattern and thereby lay the main bricks for the evolution of the older theories of crises into a theory of the...

This paper discusses the theory of crises propounded by Louis Amable Petit (1868) in the context of the state of similar theories in the second half of the 19th century. An adversary of Say’s law, Petit offered an endogenous explanation of crises based on the fluctuations of the part of income...

Lawrence R. Klein was the father of macro-econometric modeling, the scientific practice that dominated macroeconomics throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, understanding how Klein developed his identity as a macro-econometrician and how he conceived and forged...

The interplay of epistemic and empiric conditions of human behaviour plays a crucial role in economic causality but it is not satisfactorily analysed by the existing approaches to economic causality, including the most influential of them: Granger causality. In order to find a more satisfactory...