William Niskanen passed away on October 26. I have always admired Niskanen a lot. He was a champion of liberty and a great economist.

Any student of Public Choice theory would know Niskanen’s classic Bureaucracy and Representative Government from 1971 and I still think of this as his greatest contribution to economic theory. However, as Bill Woolsey reminds us William Niskanen was also a long time proponent of nominal income targeting.

Niskanen first advocated nominal income targeting or rather targeting of nominal spending in his 1992 paper “Political Guidance on Monetary Policy”. Niskanen later elaborated on the subject in his 2001 paper “A test of the Demand Rule” and further in his 2002 paper “On the Death of the Phillips Curve”.

Marcus Nunes has an insight comment on “A test of the Demand Rule” here.