Milton Friedman's influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman's professional triumph is testament to the...

Behavioral models are considered in the paper as the link between the description of the institutional structure of the economic system and the formation of macro-aggregates, reflecting the results of its operations. The degree of homogeneity of the private sector’s economic environment and...

Milton Friedman's influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman's professional triumph is testament to the...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas’s work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas’s non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

It is often argued that what marks the difference between Keynesian macroeconomics and new classical macroeconomics (the first installment of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models) is the presence of microfoundations. These are deemed to be absent in the Keynesian approach, but central...

Robert Lucas is rightfully credited with having changed the course of macroeconomic theory. The aim of this paper is to document his transformation from a potential contributor to Keynesian macroeconomics to the master builder of an alternative paradigm, equilibrium macroeconomics. I reconstruct...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They maintained that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

Mainstream macroeconomists agree that we live in the age of microfoundations. The recent worldwide financial crisis may have emboldened critics of this microfoundational orthodoxy, but it remains the dominant view that macroeconomic models must go beyond supply and demand functions to the level...

Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quarter of all journal articles in economics and in...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...