The archive.

What makes a difficult banking law usable, especially for a foreign reader? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser praises Hans Pröhl’s commentary for combining clear explanation with the documents needed to interpret the statute, including reporting guidelines and agreements on maximum deposit interest rates. Her assessment offers a precise distinction: she commends the commentary’s practical aids to understanding, not the law’s economic purposes or effects.

The more capital goods an economy produces, the lower the return on further investment must fall — so runs the static inference this sharp intervention in trade-cycle theory sets out to break. The confusion, Hayek locates in the ambiguity of "capital": aggregate value versus the concrete form and arrangement of capital goods. Investment comes in complementary chains, and once specific fixed capital is sunk, its owners accept prices barely above operating cost, transferring the expected interest to later stages — so that completing a project begun under a 4 percent expectation stays worthwhile even at rates that would have blocked it. A hydroelectric plant may turn unprofitable yet still generate demand for motors. Past investment can thus raise, not lower, the demand for funds, with credit expansion the chief practical trigger.

The success of current investment will depend upon this expectation being fulfilled.

Updating French cheque law did not mean updating every part of a banking treatise. In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser precisely marks the scope of Joseph Hamel’s supplement: it presents changes to French law, now based on the Geneva Conventions of 1931, while leaving revision of the international cheque-law section to a further edition. Her notice offers a useful distinction between what the supplement supplies and what remains outstanding, rather than an assessment of Hamel’s legal interpretations.

For the fiftieth-anniversary volume of the Revue d'Economie Politique, Strigl described how economics was actually taught in the universities of his own Vienna — here in the French translation prepared for that Paris series. Long a marginal subject lodged within the law faculties and pushed late in the curriculum, economics had, he explains, been reduced for many students to an examination hurdle despite teaching of the first rank in the Austrian School tradition. He works through the old regulations, the 1935 reform that lengthened legal study and introduced early exercises in basic economic concepts, and the little-used Staatswissenschaft doctorate, before turning to the technical schools and the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His closing claim is plain: the worldwide reputation of the Austrian School is itself the best evidence for the quality of that teaching.

Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.

English translation: “For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.”

It was not the gold standard's international character that doomed interwar monetary order, Hayek argues, but a world unwilling to run a genuinely international money. Delivered as five lectures at Geneva in 1937, his case defines monetary nationalism as the doctrine that a nation's share of the world's money should be governed differently from the money of its own regions, and traces the resulting instability to national reserve systems perched atop small gold holdings. Variable exchange rates, he contends, magnify rather than tame short-term capital movements, breeding capital flight, trade restriction, and fresh political friction. Under a truly homogeneous international money, national denominations would matter no more than differing units of measurement, and until some international authority exists to supply it, even a mechanical gold rule is preferable to independently managed national currencies.

The Monetary Nationalists condemn it because it is international; I, on the other hand, ascribe its shortcomings to the fact that it is not international enough.

A market with many sellers need not exhibit perfect competition, and product differentiation need not secure lasting excess profits. In this 1937 article, Fritz Machlup separates distinctions that familiar market labels can obscure. His starting point is the seller’s calculation: does a proposed price change require anticipating rivals’ reactions, or only buyers’ responses? This perspective places monopoly alongside competitive positions in one respect, while distinguishing both from strategically interdependent oligopoly. Machlup then separates the shape of perceived demand from the conditions under which entry and adjustment erode abnormal returns. The result gives readers a precise way to examine why similar short-run pricing positions may have different futures—and why a threat of entry can restrain one seller while a temporary advantage encourages another to exploit it.

A productive service is never simply a thing but a quantity applied over an interval, and from that observation Machlup builds a patient dismantling of loose talk about the marginal product. Labour-hours, acre-seasons, machine-days: each unit depends on divisibility, and highly qualified labour may be hired by the minute at one extreme or by five-year contract at the other. 'Efficiency units' tempt the theorist into circularity, since a theory meant to explain factor prices cannot first define factor quantities by those prices. What matters for a firm's hiring, he argues, is neither extra bushels nor their value at an unchanged price, but an expected, dated, discounted money net product framed by a definite competitive situation — marginal productivity rendered conditional rather than emptied of meaning.

This third dimension is, then, the time interval between the application of any productive service, say a labor-hour, and the enjoyment of its product.

Clarity and ease of consultation are Helene Lieser’s criteria in this brief 1937 review of the first volume of Otto Wittschieben’s introduction to Austrian financial law. She recommends a guide intended for students also to practitioners without specialist tax expertise. Her notice draws attention to the volume’s institutional scope: budgets, financial administration and public debt precede the systematic treatment of tax legislation reserved for volume two. It offers a compact assessment of whom the book serves and why its organization matters.

What makes a statutory text usable without commentary? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser credits the Beck edition of the Stock Corporation Act with providing practical alternatives: an official explanatory statement, a subject index, and skillfully placed cross-references. Her compact judgement distinguishes editorial assistance from legal commentary, showing what she values in a reference edition without offering a substantive assessment of the law itself.

How must a legally prescribed “workplace community” be adapted to commercial credit cooperatives? Helene Lieser’s brief 1937 review identifies this as the subject of E. H. Meyer’s study and commends his account as clear and interesting. The notice records her favorable assessment of a specific encounter between labour law and cooperative organization, without detailing Meyer’s proposals or offering an independent argument.

How can a nonspecialist find a way through German foreign-exchange law? In this brief 1937 review of Kurt Urbanek’s Die Devisengesetzgebung, Helene Lieser singles out the practical value of grouping and numbering difficult legal material. Her praise concerns a compact, inexpensive guide to legislation and its implementation, not the merits of exchange controls themselves. The notice offers a precise glimpse of her criteria for useful legal exposition: affordability, economy and navigability.

Helene Lieser’s brief review of Robert Lisnik’s Das neue Depot-Gesetz judges the guide by its usefulness to readers facing a change in German securities-custody law. She singles out the introduction’s clear account of the new provisions, alongside annotations and a subject index. The review offers a compact example of her practical reviewing criteria: clarity about legislative change and ease of reference, rather than an assessment of the law’s merits.