Tag Archives: Business cycles

Still clueless. Caught in the bubble and out of touch. “For every one positive article about capitalism, there are 11 negative ones,” said Nathan Rosenberg, founding partner of Insigniam, a management consulting firm. “CEOs should seize their job. Capitalism has created more elevation of [the] human condition than any religion or government ever has. We don’t tell our story. We don’t talk about the benefits. We have to get out and tell our story.”... FortuneDoes Capitalism Have a PR...

J.W. Mason kicked off the latest skirmish in the never-ending macro wars with his Jacobin article "A Demystifying Decade for Economics." (Note: at the time of writing, the article was taken down until its publication in Jacobin.) This prompted a Twitter debate about representative agent macro, which eventually led to this Beatrice Cherrier article on heterogeneous agent models. In my view, the debate about representative agent models is a red herring. Mainstream macroeconomists main skill...

  In case anybody is in the area around New York, the Program of the PEWS conference below. Thursday, April 26, 2018 -- 4:30 - 5:20 p.m. Reception in the DiMenna-Nyselius Library Room 107 C 5:20 p.m. Formal Opening of the Conference Library Multimedia Room Welcome: Eric Mielants (Sociology) Katsiaryna Salavei Bardos (Finance) Introduction of Keynote Speakers Dean Greenwald (CAS) Immanuel Wallerstein (Sociology, Yale University) “Cycles Within Structures versus Structural...

This is a review of this edited book that was just published in the Review of Political Economy.This substantial volume provides an interesting and exhaustive discussion of the theories of business cycles as presented in the main economic dictionaries and encyclopedias over a period of almost two centuries. For the most part the content corresponds to the views of key authors who contributed to the development of the theories of fluctuations. Some major authors are nevertheless not directly...

New paper. From the abstract: Prebisch believed that understanding the evolution of capitalist economies over time and in different contexts required a general cycle approach, encompassing all the different areas of economic activity, which he labelled “economic dynamics.” This theory, developed between 1945 and 1949, stemmed from a critique of both neoclassical and Keynesian theories, which Prebisch viewed as static representations of capitalism. It was applied first to a closed economy...

New paper with Esteban Pérez published in ECLAC Review; for now only the Spanish version is available, but soon there will be an English version (they always released it later).

Luca Fiorito, my sometimes co-author, and Carlo Cristiano have published (subscription required) class notes from Frank H. Knight's business cycle course in the fall of 1936, that used Keynes' General Theory (GT) as one of his references. Two quotes from the notes by Perham Nahal are reproduced below. The main postulate of Keynes: the supply curve for labor should be drawn in terms of money, with no reference to the value of money (real vs. money wages). There is no tendency for the price of...

Keynes reading (not the same) New paper just published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics. From the abstract: Keynes had a profound influence on Prebisch in terms of the diagnosis about the main failures of market economies and the need to pursue pro-active and anti-cyclical policies. However, Prebisch was critical of some aspects of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in particular on the theory of interest and the multi- plier. His attitude can be explained by...