This paper examines the relationship of the monetary economics of James Tobin to modern monetary theory, which has diverged in many ways from the directions taken by Tobin and his associates (for example, moving away from multi‐asset models of financial market equilibrium and from monetary...

Solow has repeatedly called for the development of models that combine equilibrium and out-of equilibrium outcomes or what he called a macroeconomics of the medium-run. This paper recounts the history of Solow's different attempts to address this issue. It starts in early 1950s when Solow...

It is generally accepted that F.A. Hayek gave up the business cycle as an object of theoretical investigation following the publication of 1941's The Pure Theory of Capital. The present paper aims to cast a shade of doubt upon this received view. Many of Hayek's philosophical writings bear...

My paper reconstructs the path of German economist Friedrich A. Lutz (1901−1975) to American economics. The correspondence with his former teacherWalter Eucken, the founder of the Freiburg School, constitutes a crucial and yet unexplored source for the paper. Through Lutz's case, I demonstrate...

The business cycle theory of Friedrich A. Hayek offers an explanation for the onset of the Great Depression that is more complete than those of his contemporaries, including Gustav Cassel. Hayek sought to explain why the boom of the 1920s ended in the bust of 1929. In the 1930s, Hayek's theory...

John Wade formulated, in 1826 and 1833, two models of cyclical fluctuations most likely to be the first in the literature. They are fully endogenous, based on a cobweb-like mechanism affecting not agricultural production, as was customary at the time, but manufacture. Wade's earlier model relies...

Don Patinkin regarded himself a Keynesian economist, in the sense that he did not believe that the automatic market mechanism of price change efficiently leads the economy to its full-employment path. In his 1956 Money, Interest and Prices Patinkin advanced an interpretation of Keynesian...

This article contains a previously undocumented and unpublished letter from John Maynard Keynes that was written during the early stages of his writing the General Theory. The letter was to the American economist Harlan Linneus McCracken and dated 31 August 1933. The letter was only discovered...

In a paper read in 1848 before the Dublin Statistical Society, James Anthony Lawson propounded a theory of commercial crises based on a credit – overtrading – speculation mechanism. This view was quite widespread at the time, but it was couched in an original reinterpretation of the causal...

In 1969 Don Patinkin responded to a 1956 claim made by Milton Friedman concerning the 'oral tradition' at Chicago in the thirties and forties. Friedman's seemingly innocuous remark initiated a debate over an apparent characterisation of a school of thought rather than any specific theoretical or...