Paolo Sylos Labini’s Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani’s famous formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini’s major aim when reviewing his work (1958),...

The interest-rate controversies between Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher have attracted little attention and, in the opinion of most commentators, justifiably so. Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher argue over what appear to be two minor issues – Böhm-Bawerk's claims that his third cause of interest (productivity...

Combining concrete policy-oriented modeling strategies of World War II with what was received as traditional neoclassical theory, in 1956 Robert Solow constructed a simple, clean, and smooth-functioning “design” model that served many different purposes. As a working object it enabled...

Samuelson and Solow in their 1960 paper in the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings were among the first economists to engage with Phillips’ famous unemployment/wage-inflation analysis, now referred to as the Phillips curve. They addressed the question of the relevance of...

Modern growth theory derives mostly from Robert Solow’s “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (1956). Solow’s own interpretation locates the origins of his “Contribution” in his view that the growth model of Roy Harrod implied a tendency toward progressive collapse of the...

MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the “growthmen” of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow’s seminal...

This paper examines the relationship of the monetary economics of James Tobin to modern monetary theory, which has diverged in many ways from the directions taken by Tobin and his associates (for example, moving away from multi-asset models of financial market equilibrium and from monetary...

The potted histories of macroeconomics textbooks are typically Keynes-centric. Keynes is credited with founding macroeconomics, and the central developments in the field through the early 1970s, including large-scale macroeconometric models are usually termed “Keynesian.” The story of...

The Pigou effect was conceived to counter Keynes’s argument that a competitive economy could remain in the state of high unemployment. Before he introduced this idea, Pigou had debated with Keynes the same question of whether an economy has the tendency to recover full employment. He lost in...