Nationality American Name Thomas Humphrey | Role Economist | |
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Books Money, exchange, and production | ||
Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey (born 1935) is an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the Bank's scholarly journal, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of the history of monetary economics.
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Writing and speaking career
Humphrey has written books and journal articles on monetary policy history. He is the author of articles published in journals such as the Cato Institute, HOPE (History of Political Economy), Southern Economics Journal (the journal of the Southern Economic Association), and Econ Focus (formerly Region Focus). He wrote over 70 articles published in the journals of the Richmond Federal Reserve. Some articles such as Rival Notions of Money by Humphrey may be accessed through EconPapers.
Humphrey became an editor of the Federal Reserve of Richmond Economic Quarterly (previously known as the Economic Review). In 1998 his annual report for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond was Mercantilists and Capitalists: Insights from Doctrinal History.
His four books on monetary policy history are The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments, Exchange Rates, and World Inflation (co-author Robert Keleher), Money, Banking and Inflation: Essays in the History of Monetary Thought, Money, Exchange and Production: Further Essays in the History of Economic Thought, and Essays on Inflation. Charles R. McCann, Jr. stated, in reference to Humphrey's book Money, Banking and Inflation: Essays in the History of Monetary Thought that "monetary economists looking for an accessible introduction to their discipline's past will find few better starting points than this volume."(registration required)
His writing on the history of economic thought has been included in An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics to which he contributed an article on the Chicago School of Economics, and also in festschriften, book reviews, textbooks, annual reports, and anthologies. For Famous Figures in Diagrams and Economics by Mark Blaug and Peter Lloyd, Humphrey wrote the first chapter, Marshallian Cross Diagrams and Chapter 55, Intertemporal utility maximization – the Fisher diagram.
In 2006, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke at the Fourth ECB Central Banking Conference, Frankfurt, Germany, cited Humphrey's article on the real bills doctrine. In 2008 Humphrey gave the Fourth Annual Ranlett Lecture in Economics at California State University, Sacramento, entitled Lender of Last Resort: The Concept in History. In 2009 Humphrey participated in the Adam Smith Program, Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, where he presented The Fed's Deviation from Classical Thornton-Bagehot Lender-of-Last-Resort Policy, a paper co-authored with Richard Timberlake. At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Economics Association (AEA) in Atlanta, Georgia, his subject was The Lender of Last Resort in the History of Economic Thought. In February 2013, he wrote Working Paper No. 751 Arresting Financial Crises: The Fed Versus the Classicals for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, an essay which was subsequently presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia of the American Economics Association.