I think of my papers as following three broad lines, and think of the papers in each line as chapters of an eventual book.
I. Foundations of Monetary Economics. All of this work is aimed at developing a theory that takes as its starting point the inside credit character of modern money.
A. Apart from some early mathematical papers--
"A Note on the Optimum Quantity of Money" (1995),
--most of this work remains unpublished. To my mind, the most important of these unpublished papers is my attempt at empirical implementation / verification,
B. In recent years I have focused my theoretical efforts more on developing lectures for my undergraduate and graduate courses (ECON V3265, G6712). Here is the first graduate lecture:
A more recent manifesto-like piece is
My current work focuses on understanding the central bank as a special kind of security dealer.
C. A central purpose of all this work is to provide a money theoretical basis for macroeconomics. My reasons for thinking this is the right way forward for macroeconomics come from my understanding of the history and development of macroeconomics. The development of my thinking on this line can be traced in my papers:
II. History of Monetary Economics (and Finance). All of this work is aimed at understanding why monetary economics has followed certain lines and neglected others, with a view toward assessing the possible value of the neglected lines for my own theoretical project.
A. My book The Money Interest and the Public Interest (1998) follows one distinctively American tradition through the life and work of Allyn Young, Alvin Hansen, and Edward Shaw. My paper
continues the line after Shaw. Another paper,
backtracks to consider one of the more important intellectual influences on this line.
B. My book Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance explores the rise of modern finance through a study of the life and work of Fischer Black. Here is a first draft of the book chapters that deal with Black's academic years:
C. I've also been accumulating quite a number of papers on individual authors or monetary episodes, papers that I intend eventually to collect in a third book. Two such papers are the ones on Minsky and Schumpeter mentioned above, but there are several others as well already published. Here are some recent chapters:
III. Applications of
Monetary Economics (and Finance).
All of this work is intended to test my developing theoretical views by
using them to analyze current events. I contemplate an eventual book on
the financial problems of the welfare state, focusing on retirement finance
(Social Security), education finance, and health finance. The outlines
of the project as a whole appear in one of my courses (ECON
BC3063 Senior Seminar ). Several papers represent eventual chapters in the book:
