Vaughan wrote an early work on currency, A Discourse of Coin and Coinage (1675). He argued that it was a mass voluntary consensus, the "concurrence of mankind", that gave currency its value as a medium of exchange, not the laws which enforce the usage of currency or the inherent worth of a currency's material composition (such as gold or silver). This work also contained the earliest known research on price level changes and price indices. John Ramsay McCulloch included A Discourse... in his A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Money (1856).
Economist Murray N. Rothbard has said that Vaughan was "perhaps the best economic analyst" of his period. Rothbard has praised Vaughan for recognizing that whilst the value of a good is dependent on consumer demand, a good's price results from the interaction of its subjective utility and relative scarcity.
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