The paper is concerned with the traditional "assignment" to be found in many textbooks that holds central bankers responsible for inflation – and inflation only – while government politicians are recommended to care for the short-term stabilisation of the economy (or not to...

This text contains the autumn forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 29 October 2014. The first part discusses recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy....

During the 2008/2009 recession, most countries resorted to discretionary fiscal policy measures. In this paper, we run two simulations with the KOF Swiss Economic Institute’s macroeconomic model to assess how both the Swiss stimulus measures, and the measures taken by Switzerland’s major...

Hartwig (2008) has presented empirical evidence that the difference between real wage growth and productivity growth at the macroeconomic level is a robust explanatory variable for deflated health-care expenditure growth in OECD countries. In this paper, we test whether this finding is robust to...

Against the backdrop of Baumol's model of ‘unbalanced growth’, a recent strand of literature has presented models that manage to reconcile structural change with Kaldor's ‘stylized fact’ of the relative constancy of per-capita real GDP growth. Another strand of literature goes beyond...

This Symposium consists of individual comments by three authors on papers previously published by the other two (Allain, 2009, Hartwig, 2007 and Hayes, 2007) on the topic of Keynes’s principle of effective demand as set out in The General Theory. The Symposium includes updated versions of PKSG...

The paper investigates the nexus between inventory investment and the change in aggregate production for 29 European countries over the period 2000-2009. A special interest is taken in the “Great Recession” of 2008/09. For most countries, a fairly uniform pattern emerges. Inventory...

Our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure (HCE) growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of 'model uncertainty': the Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). We analyse data for 33 OECD countries over the...

Two recent articles in this journal present conflicting interpretations of the Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply (D/Z) model contained in Chapter 3 of Keynes's <italic>General Theory</italic>. This paper evaluates the two interpretations to determine which aligns more closely with Keynes's own views.

<title>Abstract</title>This paper is one of three contributions to a symposium commenting on papers previously published by the other authors. I basically agree with Allain's (2009) reconstruction of Keynes's model of effective demand from Chapter 3 of <italic>The General Theory</italic>, except that I think that entrepreneurs...