NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
ERIC Number: EJ696925
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2005-Feb-1
Pages: 15
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0022-3808
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
David Hume's Monetary Theory Revisited: Was He Really a Quantity Theorist and an Inflationist?
Wennerlind, Carl
Journal of Political Economy, v113 n1 p223 Feb 2005
David Hume's monetary theory has been controversial since its formulation. Lately, the focus has been on Hume's alleged misapplication of the quantity theory of money. While he appears to subscribe to a simple quantity theory with money neutrality, in a famously contested passage in the essay Of Money, he violates the neutrality condition by claiming that an increase in the money stock has favorable output effects. While most commentators argue about the persistence of the output effect, this paper suggests that we can derive an alternative understanding of Hume's monetary thinking by recognizing that he made an analytical distinction between endogenous and exogenous money. Realization that only the former has a favorable output effect forces us to overturn the long-standing consensus that Hume instructed the government to use monetary or trade policy to engineer a gradually increasing money stock.
University of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel: 773-753-3347; Web site: http://www.journal.uchicago.edu; e-mail: subscriptions@press.uchicago.edu
Publication Type: Journal Articles
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: N/A
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A