David!Hume's monetary theory revisited: Was he really a quantity theorist and an inflationist?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wennerlind, C
• 署名单位: Columbia University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/426037
• 发表日期: 2005
• 页码: 223-237
• 关键词: SPECIE-FLOW MECHANISM

摘要

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.