3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Protecting prices can leave production and employment less secure: this is the tension Erich Schiff examines in his 1932 essay on the Depression. Following support schemes for wheat, coffee, rubber, and cotton, he argues that maintained prices encouraged output and accumulating stocks, preparing sharper collapses when support failed. His distinctive concern is not price flexibility as an end in itself, but the difference between stabilizing monetary values and sustaining real economic activity. Cartelized industrial inputs bring the conflict into focus: protecting suppliers’ prices can squeeze downstream firms exposed to competition. Schiff’s qualified case—more receptive to direct production cuts, and explicitly short of a complete explanation of the Depression—offers readers a concrete way to examine who bears the adjustment costs when particular prices are held steady.
The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.
Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.
English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”
A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.
An accounting calculation changes its function with the system in which it operates: this is the insight Erich Schiff singles out in his review of Erich Schneider’s introduction to industrial accounting. Schiff approaches the book as an encounter between economic theory and business administration, distinguishing its logical analysis of cost and profit computation from both practical bookkeeping instruction and a broader economics of production. His assessment makes clear why mass production and production to order require different computational frameworks—and why theoretical clarity can come at a pedagogical cost. The book’s avoidance of concrete examples and assumption of bookkeeping knowledge qualify its promise as an “Introduction.” This compact review offers a precise account of what Schneider’s abstraction achieves and what it demands of students.
Can the supply of bank loans be explained like the output of an industrial firm? In this review of Antonio Graziadei’s study, Erich Schiff welcomes the distinction between bank lending and capital supplied by private savers, but questions the equation of banks’ unit costs with the supply price of loans. His objection turns on a concrete feature of banking: deposits that bear no interest still affect how much banks can lend, although they generate no interest expense to enter Graziadei’s cost curve. The review offers a compact encounter between a Marshallian model and the institutional conditions it must explain, showing how Schiff separates a worthwhile research question from a solution whose simplifying assumptions remain unproven.