Maurice Potron (1872-1942) is a French Jesuit and mathematician whose main source of inspiration in economics is the encyclical Rerum Novarum. With virtually no knowledge in economic theory, he wrote down a linear model of production in which he formalized the notions of just prices and just...

Francois Huet (1814-1869), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ghent, is known for his attempt to reconcile Christianity with socialism in Le Regne Social du Christianisme (1853). The book clearly belongs to a distinctively Belgian tradition of 'liberal socialism'. Drawing upon archival...

This is an introduction to a selection of papers on early contributions to quantitative business cycle theory. The papers, originally presented at a conference in Antwerp in September 2005, are written by Edmond Malinvaud, Olav Bjerkholt, Mauro Boianovsky and Hans-Michael Trautwein, Robert W....

The little-known Belgian engineer Bernard Chait contributed to business cycle theory by means of a mathematical model, of which the 'law of divergence' was an important building block. The law of divergence has been interpreted as a generalization of the acceleration principle. This paper draws...