Friedman (1968) - his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association - contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper's crucial argument.  That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift in...

There is a widely believed but entirely mythical story to the effect that the discovery of 'the Phillips curve' was, in the 1960s and perhaps later, an inspiration to inflationist policy.  The point that this is a myth is argued in Forder, Macroeconomics and the Phillips curve myth, OUP 2014. ...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

Samuelson and Solow published a widely read paper in the May issue of the American Economic Review of 1960. It discussed the causes of inflation, the Phillips curve, and related matters. Discussion of their paper frequently says that it presented the Phillips curve as a stable, exploitable...

The 'expectations critique', usually attributed to Friedman or Phelps and dated towards the end of the 1960s, in fact originates much earlier.  And rather than being an insight properly attributable to a particular individual, it was, by that time, a commonplace of economic discussion.  This...

In his Nobel lecture, Friedman built on his earlier argument for a 'natural rate of unemployment' by painting a picture of an economics profession which, as a result of foolish mistakes, had accepted the Phillips curve as offering a lasting trade-off between inflation and unemployment and were...

The idea of the 'L-shaped aggregate supply curve', supposedly a feature of primitive macroeconomic models, is in fact a reasonable reconstruction of a well developed way of thinking that specifically denied a relation between wage change and aggregate employment.  Neither that approach nor the...

This paper makes a contribution to the study of economic growth in developing countries by analysing the six largest Latin American Economies over 105 years within a two-equation framework. Confirming previous findings, physical and human capital prove to be key determinants of GDP per capita...

This paper introduces new data on climatic conditions to empirical tests of growth theories. We find that, since 1960, temperate countries have converged towards high levels of income while tropical nations have converged towards various income levels associated with economic scale and the...

By generalizing Hamiltons model of the US business cycle to a three-regime Markov-switching vector autoregressive model, this paper analyzes regime shifts in the stochastic process of economic growth in the US, Japan and Europe over the last four decades. Empirical evidence is established for...