Six great trends have characterized the evolution of mature capitalist economies in the recent decades: 1. successful efforts to lower inflation from the levels of the 1970s; 2. Real growth significantly lower as compared to early post-WW2 decades; 3. a greater frequency in financial instability...

The work of John Hicks is an unending source of inspiration for many economists and an unsolved dilemma for most historians of economic thought. In these pages, a reconstruction of the continuity principle, the red thread of his evolution as a theorist is proposed. Hicks’ research was inspired...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former’s flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter’s extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking...

Some have argued that a significant decrease in the demand for money, due to financial innovations, could imply that central banks are unable to implement effective monetary policies. This paper argues that central banks are always able to influence the economy's interest rates, because their...

This paper provides an analysis of Keynes's original "Bancor" proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today's economy, and that they implicitly adopt an unsatisfactory...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on the two sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost commonplace to contrast the Fed and the European Central Bank (ECB) by pointing out the flexibility and capacity to adjust of the former and the rigidity and extreme caution of the latter, and its...

This paper studies the effects of an (exogenous) increase of nominal wages on profits, output, and growth. Inspired by an article by Michal Kalecki (1991), who concentrated on the effects on total profits, the paper develops a model that explicitly considers the dynamics of demand, prices,...

The paper contributes to the debate on growth and distribution in a non-mainstream perspective. It looks at the role that capacity utilization plays in the process of growth under the hypothesis that the rate of capital depreciation is a function of the degree of capacity utilization. Our...