This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a “bad” equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to...

This paper explores the Marxian genetic root of the multiplier in order to clarify its foundations and validity conditions. Though the analysis is restricted to the first two volumes of Capital and the early contributions by Kalecki in the 1930s, we argue that we can draw from these works...

Macroeconomic indicators – especially inflation, GDP growth, public deficits and unemployment – stand central in economic governance. Policymakers use them to assess their economies' health. Citizens evaluate politicians' performance using them as yardsticks. But these indicators defy simple...

A number of macroeconomic theories, very popular in the 1980s, seem to have completely disappeared and been replaced by the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) approach. We will argue that this replacement is due to a tacit agreement on a number of assumptions, previously seen as...

Macroeconomic theories of the 1980s faced accelerated depreciation when not sudden death. By contrast with econometrics and microeconomics and despite massive progress in access to data and the use of statistical softwares, macroeconomic theory appears not to be a cumulative science so far. When...

This paper discusses a longstanding debate between two empirical approaches to macroeconomics: the econometrics program represented by Lawrence R. Klein, and the statistical economics program represented by Milton Friedman. I argue that the differences between these two approaches do not consist...

We study the construction of the macroeconometric model of the Committee on Economic Stability (CES) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the early 1960s using the CES's archival records. Building this model was central not only to set the bases for the subsequent construction of...

The potted histories of macroeconomics textbooks are typically Keynes-centric. Keynes is credited with founding macroeconomics, and the central developments in the field through the early 1970s, including large-scale macroeconometric models are usually termed "Keynesian." The story of...

How do fluctuations in Keynes’s notion of aggregate effective demand and their nominal income and expenditure counterparts divide into output and price level changes? Friedman called this the “missing equation” problem, and declared that neither Keynesians, nor Monetarists, nor he had...