Inflation and the Theory of Money

Martin Bronfenbrenner in the Journal of Finance had this to say when the book was first released "A thoughtful, scholarly, and systematic treatise on the economics of inflation. If this reviewer were asked to hang a course on inflation theory upon one single text, it would almost certainly be this one." The principal concern of this book is to set out the elements that enter into problems of analyzing inflation. This detailed, readable review of contemporary theory on the problems of inflation fills an important gap in the literature on macro-economics that: 1) assesses the implications of inflationary processes for economic policy; 2) synthesizes a general framework within which to illustrate inflationary processes; 3) reconciles the approaches of "demand inflation" and "cost inflation"; and 4) analyzes the determination and behavior of the general price level in an exchange economy. The first part of the book reviews neo-classical and "Keynesian" type models of the closed macro-economy, analyzes determination of the general price level, and introduces a restatement of conventional employment theory with emphasis on the general price level. The second part considers the problems of price and wage determinations and the demand for money in more detail, synthesizing the analyses into a model of the macro-economy and discussing the implications of this model and the preceding analysis for economic policy. Describing alternative approaches to the theory of inflation, each of which has resulted in partial theories, the book avoids fragmentary explanations by setting the entire discussion in the context of a macro-economic general equilibrium framework.