Commodity markets are characterized by high price volatility, inefficient resource allocation and the cyclical reappearance of excessive surpluses and shortages. Historically, these problems and their relevant socio-economic implications have been tackled by means of protectionist measures at...

<title>Abstract</title>This paper argues against the distance which has been growing between economic history and history of economic thought (HET). Two examples, drawn from the history of monetary theory, are provided of how neglecting the historical background may lead to erroneous interpretations and...

<title>Abstract</title> We review Keynes's constant concern with commodity prices, both as speculator and as theorist, arguing that it was never divorced from his view on market instability. We also look at Kahn's contribution on buffer stocks, which brought to fruition the original intuition by Keynes,...

[fre] La question posée est de savoir si une marchandise peut être choisie arbitrairement comme étalon monétaire. L'analyse distingue la fonction de l'étalon monétaire et la fonction du numéraire. Ricardo a soulevé la question des caractéristiques que doit avoir la marchandise choisie...

In August 2011 Edward Fullbrook, the editor of the Real World Economics Review and the driving force behind the World Economics Association (WEA), asked the three of us to take on editorial roles in the newly established philosophy, methodology and history of thought journal of the association....

At a distance of nearly two centuries since it broke out, the Bullion Controversy is still an endless source of questions and interpretations. The most recent contributions to the debate have focussed mainly on two points. The first is the position taken by one of most eminent participants in...

The rise of classical political economy has certainly marked a change in the way economic theory dealt with monetary issues, as it combined the microeconomic knowledge of the problems of metallic circulation with a macroeconomic analysis of the causes of monetary disturbances (balance of...

In this paper the authors present the findings of their research on a vast database containing the relevant information on the scientific characteristics of the three cohorts of assistant professors recruited in Italy in the early 1980s, the 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium....