2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Money and credit, in Schlesinger's 1914 treatise, are not external additions to a 'real' theory of exchange but endogenous parts of a single system of mutually determined prices, quantities, interest rates, cash balances, and bank reserves. Building on Walrasian general equilibrium, Austrian marginal and capital theory, and Schumpeter's distinction of statics from dynamics, he moves from a barter benchmark through entrepreneurial profit and risk to a sophisticated quantity theory in which the demand for cash is shaped by payment habits, clearing, and velocity. Deposit banks both mediate and create purchasing power, bounded by reserves and confidence, which renders financial crises intelligible as tensions between credit expansion and the cash base that must ultimately settle it. The appendices press the claim of formal determinacy by counting equations against unknowns.
Eine wesentliche Folge dessen, daß die Wirklichkeit mit dieser Voraussetzung nicht übereinstimmt, ist das Geld.
English translation: “An essential consequence of the fact that reality does not conform to this assumption is money.”
Scarcity alone cannot explain wartime inflation. In this 1916 lecture to the Hungarian Economic Society, Schlesinger tracks how war finance moves through the monetary circuit: reduced output lifts prices only once, but state spending met by newly created money returns as income, is spent again, and drives a progressive depreciation—an indirect tax that quietly strips a portion of purchasing power from every holder. Against this he sets the offsets, arguing that war loans neutralize nothing on their own but merely register private holders refraining from pressing their claims on goods. The agio, likewise, is no separate mystery but follows from domestic prices rising faster than foreign ones, with export prohibitions aggravating it and repatriated foreign assets braking the fall. Stabilizing the currency, he concludes, matters more than restoring any old parity.
Innerhalb einer kurzen Studie kann die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nicht in all ihren Windungen verfolgt werden; darum kann ich hier nur ein stark stilisiertes Bild der Kriegswirtschaft bieten, dessen Konturen mit denen der Wirklichkeit in keinem einzigen Punkte übereinstimmen.
English translation: “Within a short study the economic development cannot be traced in all its windings; therefore I can here offer only a strongly stylized picture of the war economy, whose contours coincide with those of reality at not a single point.”
How can dearer fodder explain both falling cattle prices and rising pork prices? Karl Schlesinger makes this puzzle in wartime price analysis a test of what counts as a causal explanation in economic history. In this 1917 article, he argues that listing costs, supplies, and demand is not enough: historians must establish how these factors interact and when their effects occur. His defence of deduction rests on observed economic behaviour, not on premises insulated from experience. Yet theory is no finished toolkit: historical inquiry must help it account for adjustment over time, intervention, and monopoly. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish competing explanations of the same evidence—and shows why a change in causal ordering can change a prediction.
Support for struggling banks need not mean preserving them all. In this brief 1918 account, Karl Schlesinger describes Hungary’s Geldinstituts-Zentrale, a state-backed cooperative founded in 1916 to provide liquidity while also rehabilitating, merging or liquidating weak institutions. His medical vocabulary—“therapeutic” and “preventive”—frames banking policy as both repair and continuing oversight. Especially revealing is the connection between assistance and scrutiny: smaller institutions borrowing from the Zentrale were subject to detailed audits, which Schlesinger expected to become a regular feature of Hungarian banking. Written in anticipation of urgent capital demand after peace, the piece offers a concise view of the institution’s intended public purposes, rather than evidence of its eventual success.
A stamp on a banknote could declare monetary independence, but could it determine who should bear an empire’s debts? In this March 1920 article, Karl Schlesinger examines the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian currency as a struggle over inherited liabilities, fiscal needs, and the location of circulating money. His attention falls on the gap between legal separation and practical enforcement: counterfeit stamps defeated border controls, while Czechoslovakia’s attempted monetary contraction produced shortages without promptly lowering prices. The same scrutiny informs his criticism of the peace treaty’s liquidation provisions, which assigned rights according to histories of individual notes that officials could not establish. Readers encounter monetary sovereignty not as a clean administrative act, but as a contested redistribution of wealth whose consequences depended on confidence, credit, and enforceable rules.