The Foundations of Monetary Economics presents an authoritative collection of key articles on monetary economics - one of the most contentious areas of economics. David Laidler - who has himself made important contributions - has selected those articles which are essential to an understanding of the origin and development of monetary economics. This important three-volume collection includes classic papers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries but places the emphasis on those papers written in the last half century. Particular weight is given to work that pays explicit attention to money's role in processes of exchange. Topics include the origins of money; cash in advance; overlapping generations and legal restrictions; theories of the demand for money; empirical studies of the demand for money; money, prices and output; money in general equilibrium and disequilibrium; money and clearing markets; credit market effects; monetary explanations of the cycle; money and the Great Depression; money and growth; monetary policy and the price level; rational expectations and monetary policy; central banking; free banking and the new monetary economics.

David Laidler is one of the leading scholars in the history of economic thought and macroeconomics. This important collection brings together nineteen of his essays on topics in the history of macroeconomics. It begins with a paper on Adam Smith and ends with a discussion of the implications of Newclassical economists' ideas on the role of economic ideas in conditioning agents' activities. Other chapters deal with the major themes developed by monetary economists in the intervening years. Two of the essays appear in their current form for the first time, and several others are reprinted from difficult-to-obtain sources. They should be of interest not just to historians of economic thought, but also to economists more generally.

Money and Macroeconomics is a significant collection of David Laidler's most important papers on the so-called 'monetarist counter-revolution'. This volume contains both published and unpublished examples of his influential contribution, detailing empirical work on the demand for money, the economics of inflation, the foundations of the 'buffer stock' approach to monetary theory, the monetarist critique of new classical economics and issues of economic policy.David Laidler has also prepared a personal memoir to accompany his volume which gives a revealing account of his academic career and influences, and places each essay in its original intellectual context. Money and Macroeconomics presents in one volume David Laidler's most important contributions to monetary economics. It will be invaluable to monetary and financial economists as well as policy makers and historians of economic thought.

It is a commonly held belief that, in 1936, Keynes' General Theory ushered in a new era in economic thought, with faith in the free market being replaced by reliance on systematic government intervention as a means of keeping the economy on an even keel. This book surveys the writings of a large number of economists in the interwar years and argues that the "Keynesian Revolution" is a myth, and that the "new economics" was a careful and selective synthesis of an "old economics" that had been developing for twenty years or more.

Examining the emergence, in the inter-war years, of what came to be called 'Keynesian macroeconomics'. This study accepts the novelty of the latter, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the sub-discipline for three decades. It argues, however, that this model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking but rather an extremely selective synthesis of those which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes's own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of this development as the outcome of a 'Keynesian Revolution' in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes's own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed.