The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it...

This paper surveys current debates on the distributive cycle. The literature builds on R.M. Goodwin's seminal 1967 chapter titled "A growth cycle." We review theoretical motivations for the distributive cycle, which, despite significant differences, all imply that macroeconomic activity leads...

This paper surveys current debates on the distributive cycle. The literature builds on R.M. Goodwin's seminal 1967 chapter titled "A growth cycle." We review theoretical motivations for the distributive cycle, which, despite significant differences, all imply that macroeconomic activity leads...

One of the most significant stylized facts in the U.S. economy since the 1970s has been the decline in the share of national income accruing to labor. Many recent studies have sought to explain this trend, with most explanations focusing on structural changes such as deindustrialization,...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical reassessment of supermultiplier theory. First, we show that, as a result of the passive role it assigns to investment, the Sraffian supermultiplier (SSM) predicts that the rate of utilization leads the investment share in a dampened cycle or,...

This paper provides an institutional-analytical account of changes in the structure of the US Phillips curve (PC) during the post-war period. It does so by restoring conflict and power to the forefront of macro theory and, in particular, the wage- and price-setting behaviour of workers and...

In a Kaleckian monetary distribution and growth model with conflict inflation we assess the role of a Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). The short-run stability of a NAIRU is examined taking into account real debt effects of accelerating and decelerating inflation, and the...

This paper restates the post-Keynesian view of unemployment within a NAIRU framework. In the short run, the private effective labour demand need not be downward sloping because of debt deflation and wage-led demand regimes. In the medium run, the NAIRU will be endogenous because of the social...

This paper conducts a systematic comparison of two main textbook variants within the Kaleckian tradition of post-Keynesian conflict inflation and distribution theory: the Blecker/Setterfield (2019) and Lavoie (1992, 2022) (BSL) model based on Dutt (1987), and the Hein (2023a) and...

The empirical literature on neo-Goodwinian models of growth and distribution still lacks an explicit treatment of capital accumulation. Further, and across different theoretical approaches, residential investment is seen as a critical driver of the business cycle. This paper addresses these two...