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...

A.W.H. Phillips is little known to the economics profession today, except at the creator of the Phillips curve. Bollard's engaging biography tells the story of a provincial New Zealander and practical engineer, who emerges as a hero in World War II, and plots a spectacular rise from 3rd class...

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...

Solow has repeatedly called for the development of models that combine equilibrium and out-of equilibrium outcomes or what he called a macroeconomics of the medium-run. This paper recounts the history of Solow's different attempts to address this issue. It starts in early 1950s when Solow...

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 economy. He...

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 economy. He...

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 Phillips's...

Evsey Domar put forward in a couple of articles in the 1940s a "guaranteed income growth proposal." For the first time in macroeconomics, economic policy was supposed to work merely through the impact of its announcement on expectations. He claimed that optimistic expectations of income growth...

The origins of "capital fundamentalism' - the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth - have been often ascribed to H arrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the output-capital ratio. I t is...