The Investigation of Economic Expectations.

WORKING, Holbrook.

$975.00

Item Number: 126334

n.p.: American Economic Review, 1949.

First separate edition of Working’s treatise on economic expectations. Octavo, original wrappers, illustrated with charts and graphs. In near fine condition. Small name.

American professor of economics and statistics Holbrook Working was best known for his theories on hedging, future prices, market maker behavior, and the theory of storage (including the Working curve which plots the difference between short term and long term grain futures prices against current inventory). Working disagreed with Keynes's backwardation theory of futures prices, which argued that short hedgers (farmers) drive down futures prices because of their demand for price insurance. He, instead, argued that there could be hedgers on both sides of the market and that hedging was essentially not a risk reduction technique, but "speculation in the basis" which allows informed traders and commodity dealers to profit from their knowledge of future changes in the difference between futures and spot prices.