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...

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...

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...

UK inflation varied greatly over 1865-1990, in response to many policy and exchange-rate regimes, two world wars and oil crises, and major legislative, and technological changes. It is modelled as responding to excess demands from all sectors of the economy: goods and services, factors of...

This paper studies the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over both the short and very long run.  Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting developing countries over the periods 1865-1940 and 1960-2007.  A single equation...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates.  We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the...