Johan Åkerman vs. Ragnar Frisch on Quantitative Business Cycle Analysis

The article provides an account of the debate that took place between the late 1920s and the mid 1930s between the Scandinavian economists Johan Åkerman and Ragnar Frisch about the quantitative treatment of aggregate economic fluctuations. Although both interpreted the business cycle as an interference phenomenon between waves of different order, they disagreed on how to model its generation mechanism. Åkerman's emphasis on seasonal changes in his path-breaking application of harmonic analysis to economic fluctuations was rejected by Frisch, who instead suggested the explanation of business cycles as free oscillations determined by impulse and propagation mechanisms.