About the Instructor

Neil T. Skaggs

Professor of Economics

Illinois State University

Normal, IL 61790-4200

(309) 438-7204

ntskaggs@ilstu.edu

I'm on the right; that's Thomas Jefferson on the left. We're just acquaintances, not really friends.

 

Neil Skaggs joined the faculty of Illinois State University as Assistant Professor of Economics in August 1979. He completed his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1980, with monetary economics as his major field. Dr. Skaggs was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 1985 and was promoted to Professor in 1996. In his career at ISU, Dr. Skaggs has taught microeconomics at the principles level and macroeconomics at all levels, from principles to doctoral, as well as money and banking, history of economic thought, and a variety of other classes.

Dr. Skaggs's early research agenda focused on the political behavior of the Federal Reserve System, the topic of his doctoral dissertation. After putting his research on hold to write a principles text in the late 1980s, he redirected his research efforts to the history of monetary thought. Most of his articles have focused on nineteenth-century British monetary thought, and especially on the importance of the ideas of Henry Thornton (1760-1815).

Dr. Skaggs has been married for 28 years to his wife Barb, who is a Title I reading teacher at Oakdale Elementary School in Normal.. They have four daughters. The oldest, Caroline, is a second-year graduate student in Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Her husband Jim is working on his Ph.D. in Economics at the University Michigan. The second daughter, Becky, is a senior majoring in Economics and History at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA). Daughter number three, Meredith, is a senior at University High School in Normal, where she plays trumpet and classical guitar, sings in the chorus, and runs cross country. The youngest daughter, Lindsey, is a sophomore at University High School, where she plays violin in the orchestra, sings in the chorus and jazz choir, and plays soccer.

A committed Christian, Dr.. Skaggs taught adult Bible school for twenty-five years and is serving for the twenty-sixth year as the faculty representative for the Encounter student group at ISU. (Encounter meets on Tuesday nights at 9:00 in the Campus House at the corner of Locust and Normal, across the parking lot from Milner Library.) In his spare time he referees soccer, follows the St. Louis Cardinals (baseball) and the Duke Blue Devils and ISU Redbirds (basketball), and raises hostas.

Selected Publications

"Treating Schizophrenia: A Comment on Antoin Murphy's Diagnosis of Henry Thornton's Theoretical Condition," European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 12, Summer 2005 (forthcoming).

"H.D. Macleod and the Origins of the Theory of Finance in Economic Development," History of Political Economy 35, Fall 2003.

"Thomas Tooke, Henry Thornton, and the Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy," Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25, June 2003.

"The Development of Nineteenth-Century British Monetary Orthodoxy," International Journal of Economics and Econometrics 10, January-March 2002.

"Learning by Trial and Error: A Case for Moot Courts," Journal of Economic Education 31, Spring 2000 (with J. Lon Carlson).

"Adam Smith on Growth and Credit: Too Weak A Connection?" Journal of Economic Studies 26 (6), November 1999.

"Changing Views: Twentieth-Century Opinion on the Banking School-Currency School Controversy," History of Political Economy 31, Summer 1999.

"Debt as the Basis of Currency: The Monetary Economics of Trust," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 57, October 1998.

"Henry Dunning Macleod and the Credit Theory of Money," in Money, Financial Institutions, and Macroeconomics, Avi Cohen, Harald Hagemann, and John Smithin, eds., Recent Economic Thought Series (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).

"U.S. Fiscal Policy and Trade Deficits: A Broad Perspective," Southern Economic Journal 62, January 1996 (with Hassan Mohammadi).

"Henry Thornton and the Development of Classical Monetary Economics," Canadian Journal of Economics 28, November 1995.

"The Methodological Roots of J. Laurence Laughlin's Anti-Quantity Theory of Money and Prices," Journal of the History of Economic Thought 17, Spring 1995.

"The Place of J. S. Mill in the Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy," History of Political Economy 26, Winter 1994.

"John Fullarton's Law of Reflux and Central Bank Policy," History of Political Economy 23, Fall 1991.

"A Theory of the Bureaucratic Value of Federal Reserve Operating Procedures," Public Choice 43, 1984.

"Banking Sector Influence on the Relationship of Congress to the Federal Reserve System," Public Choice 41, 1983 (with Cheryl Wasserkrug Cohn). Reprinted in E. F. Toma and M. Toma, Central Bankers, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Monetary Policy, Financial and Monetary Policy Studies Series, No. 13 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986).

"The Federal Reserve System and Congressional Demands for Information," Social Science Quarterly 64, September 1983.

Economics: Individual Choice and Its Consequences, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) with J. Lon Carlson. (First edition with Alan E. Dillingham and J. Lon Carlson, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1992.)