[.ca] Monetary Economics (ISBN 0415199263)

Comprehensive, but dry and out-of-date.:
This book is comprehensive in covering all of the conventional, albeit dated, topics in monetary economics. However, it lacks the clarity and consistency of modern textbooks. By the end of the book you will have trouble differentiating one theory from another, as many key arguments are vague or self-contradictory. In addition, very little will be presented to spark your enthusiasm for the material. If you are a professor looking for a course text, this book may be a good guide for forming a curriculum, but please do not subject your students to its dull, meandering style of presentation. Advanced students deserve a book that is more cutting edge.

Excellent:
I am currently using the book for my Master Degree level class in money and banking. The book is EXCELLENT. It is up-to-date with current issues, comprehensive and complete. My students love it. The presentation at the beginning of each chapter is outstanding. One of very few books that presents money at both the micro and macro levels. The discussions of money in Walrasian general equilibrium models and overlapping generation models are exceptional. The review and discussion questions at the end of each chapter are very helpful to students.

About as bad as a textbook can get:
Professor Handa's graduate course, the notes of which he compiled into this text, is dry, dated, off-topic, and in most cases downright irrelevant. The text itself is much, much worse. What it lacks in style, it makes up for in tediousness. On the bright side for those of the classical school of thought, its obvious bias combines seamlessly with a reliance on dubious logical manipulations to discredit Keynesian theory far better than even the most eloquent neoclassical author could. Also, for an economics text it is very reasonably priced. First off, the focus of this book is NOT monetary economics. This is a text on Keynesian macroeconomics. Not neo-Keynesian macroeconomics, either, but good old-fashioned Keynesianism from the 60's and 70's (the author got his PhD in the mid-60's, and the vast majority of the sources cited in the book are pre-1980). It is compendious, but dated (rather like professor Handa, himself). Because the text is 750 pages long, there is a fair amount of monetary material, but if a professor tried to use this book as a basis for a class, 1) it would take two or three semesters to teach, and 2) after the first semester there would be very few students left in the class. Curiously (or not), this is exactly how things work in McGill University's graduate-level courses in monetary economics, where the book was born. Surprisingly, Professor Handa wrote this 750-page monstrosity of a text without managing to make it comprehensive. Take, for example, gold. One would think that a multi-semester course on money would cover the gold standard, its pros and cons, how it developed, how it was moved away from in modern economies, and why it was able to function with such success over thousands of years and hundreds of vastly differing cultures and governments. Well, in this case you'd be wrong. Look in the index of Handa's Monetary Economics and you will find gold referenced ONCE. Flip to that page and you will see that in Handa's view the sole importance of gold with respect to money and monetary theory was that the gold standard system used under Bretton Woods necessitated the formation of the IMF. Okay, so there is no gold, but what is there? In short, Keynes-and lots of him. In fact, the old guy even pops up where you would least expect him. Take, for example, this line from the chapter on "Expectations in Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy": "Many economists have, in fact, speculated that the rational expectations hypothesis been available in Keynes' days, he would have incorporated it into his work." This may in fact be true (the book has no footnote naming the economists who allegedly speculated such things). It may also be true that Adam Smith would have incorporated REH into his work, but I hardly see the point making such a statement in a textbook. What else do you get? How about a smoke-and-mirrors "disproof" of Walras' Law? Just how do you "disprove" Walras' Law, you might ask? And why would you want to? And what would that accomplish, anyway? Trust me, you have to read it to believe it. So, is there anything worthwhile in this book? Surprisingly, yes. The text is actually designed a lot like a general historical account of macroeconomic theory, complete with short and concise summaries of some rather important papers and theories that many students would probably rather read in abbreviated summary form. What is the Baumol-Tobin transactions demand for money and how does it work? What is the Lucas Supply Rule and how does it compare to the Friedman Supply Rule? What authors and papers deal with sticky prices, efficiency wages, or labor hoarding? What is the proof behind the idea of Ricardian equivalence? Check the index, its all here. In summary, this is text is poorly organized, strongly biased, incredibly boring, and mostly only tangentially relevant to monetary economics. It may possibly be useful to novice graduate students looking for a summary of many broad macroeconomic ideas (particularly old ones) and/or papers who don't want to plow through the equally tedious primary sources. In good conscience, however, I can only recommend it as a highly effective sleep aid, and not a tool of economic learning.