Robert Triffin became famous with his trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the Bretton Woods system. These are still at the center of many discussions today. This paper argues that there is a remarkable continuity in Triffin's work. From his earliest writings, Triffin developed a vision...

It is sometimes pointed out that economic research is prone to move in cycles and react to particular events such as crises and recessions. The present paper analyses this issue through a quantitative analysis by answering two closely related research questions: (1) whether or not there are...

The present paper considers the relationships – logical and historical – between F.A. Hayek's early business cycle project and his later arguments concerning spontaneous economic orders and the methods appropriate to their investigation. It is a peculiar fact, which familiarity with the...

Friedrich Hayek has been one of the dominating intellectual figures of the 20th century. Hayek, together with Gunnar Myrdal, received the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...

This paper provides a look into what Lucas meant by the term 'analogue systems' and how he conceived making them useful. It is argued that any model can be regarded as an analogue system provided it has remarkable predictive success. The term is thus neutral in terms of usefulness. To be useful,...

We develop a market model which explains how prices react to short-run demand variations when the number of active price-setting firms is held fixed on its long-run level. We assume that for each firm the average production cost function is U-shaped, that customers are imperfectly informed about...

The economic literature started to recognize the heterogeneity characterizing the nature of different technologies, introducing the concept of General Purpose Technologies. In this paper, we offer a new view of General Purpose Technologies, building on the historical as well as on the recent...

We consider a multi-sector overlapping generations model with imperfectly competitive firms in the output markets and wage setting trade unions in the labour markets. A coordination problem between firms creates multiple temporary equilibria which are either Walrasian or of the Keynesian...

We extend the Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) agency cost model of business cycles by including time varying uncertainty in the technology shocks that affect capital production. We first demonstrate that standard linearization methods can be used to solve the model yet second moment effects still...