Capital and Interest

Capital and Interest is a three-volume work on finance published by Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk (1851–1914). The first two volumes were published in the 1880s when he was teaching at the University of Innsbruck. The first volume of Capital and Interest, titled History and Critique of Interest Theories (1884), is an exhaustive survey of the alternative treatments of the phenomenon of interest: use theories, productivity theories, abstinence theories, and many more. In this work Böhm-Bawerk built upon the time preference ideas of Carl Menger, insisting that there is always a difference in value between present goods and future goods of equal quality, quantity, and form. Furthermore, the value of future goods diminishes as the length of time necessary for their completion increases.