This paper sheds light on economic policy discussions in the early 1960s about whether there is an optimal level of demand to maximise the rate of growth. This discussion was influenced by the Cold War, which urged policy makers particularly in the USA to achieve higher rates of growth than the...

In The Trade Cycle, Roy Harrod [1936a] propounded the Law of Diminishing Elasticity of Demand. The present paper tries to clarify the precise role Harrod assigned to this law in his The Trade Cycle Theory. We discuss the micro and macro foundations of the Law of Diminishing Elasticity of Demand...

Schumpeter’s business cycle and growth theory encompasses two distinct types of superposition. The first one is well known from its graphical representation provided in Schumpeter’s Business Cycles [1939], namely the superposition of different waves or cycles of varying magnitude. There...

The aim of this paper is to add to current debates on the efficiency of economic stabilization policies through an analysis of the conception of business cycles developed by Minsky in his earliest work at the end of the 1950s.

We analyze a series of macroeconometric models developed in the years of high theory by Marschak, Frisch and Leontief. These models share an explanation of growth, cycles and fluctuations (“economic change”), based on the analysis of the circulation of capital goods among producers. They...

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 largescale macroeconometric models are usually termed “Keynesian.” The story of...

In post-war macroeconomics, economic dynamics generally refers to two distinct phenomena, economic growth and business cycles, which implies the existence of a strict dichotomy between short run and long-run analysis. In this paper we focus on two original exceptions to this prevailing view...

Spectral analysis has had limited applications in cliometrics to date. In this paper, it is used to determine, through international comparisons, the frequency of GDP series in the long run. A reminder of the spectral methodology (I) is followed by successive examinations of the series chosen,...

Business cycles and growth are considered as independent fields for decades. Indeed, after the Second World War, when macroeconomics began to develop through an increased use of mathematical models, the problem of analyzing growth-cycles dynamics appeared as a real (and certainly also...

For long, economics and sociology have been exploring rationality and decision-making with analytical tools of their own. This paper aims at comparing Keynes’s theories with Bourdieu’s in this regard. It hinges around three headings, namely: 1) a spontaneous, embodied view on action; 2) the...