UCL Research Papers

The popularity of economic ideologies: The case of monetarism

Author: Konstantinos Paschalis (University College London (UCL))

Abstract

How the popularity of economic ideas shifts has been a contentious subject with historians of economic thought, who mainly address this topic qualitatively. This paper attempts to answer this question empirically, using monetarism as a case study. I firstly analyze the applicability of the Quantity Theory of Money to the economic data of the USA and the UK, generating two regression residuals to measure this for each country. I then regress yearly mentions of monetarism in Google Scholar papers with the country residuals and two controls denoting the pandemic and financial crisis episodes of quantitative easing. I find significant, positive effects on the UK residual and the pandemic dummy, with the rest of the effects being insignificant. However, further research utilizing a more advanced keyword detection algorithm is required to validate these results and their interpretations.

Keywords: Monetarism, Quantity Theory of Money, Quantitative Easing

How to Cite: Paschalis, K. (2024) “The popularity of economic ideologies: The case of monetarism”, UCL Journal of Economics. 3(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.2755-0877.1870