Standard macroeconomic theory did not help foresee the crisis, nor has it helped understand it or craft solutions. This columns argues that both the New Classical and New Keynesian complete markets macroeconomic theories not only did not allow the key questions about insolvency and illiquidity...

Mainstream macroeconomists agree that we live in the age of microfoundations. The recent worldwide financial crisis may have emboldened critics of this microfoundational orthodoxy, but it remains the dominant view that macroeconomic models must go beyond supply and demand functions to the level...

Milton Friedman's influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman's professional triumph is testament to the...

Milton Friedman's influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman's professional triumph is testament to the...

Behavioral models are considered in the paper as the link between the description of the institutional structure of the economic system and the formation of macro-aggregates, reflecting the results of its operations. The degree of homogeneity of the private sector’s economic environment and...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They maintained that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quarter of all journal articles in economics and in...

This paper intends to explain how was a supporter of Keynes like Don Patinkin led to integrate the Pigou effect, the arch anti-Keynesian effect, in his theory of involuntary unemployment. The reading of Patinkin's unpublished PhD thesis and the use of the Don Patinkin Papers from Duke...

This paper explains the reasons that led Don Patinkin to interpret the Keynesian theory in a disequilibrium perspective. We claim that the author adopted this position because he believed that the assumption of wage rigidity misrepresented the concept of involuntary unemployment and that,...

Introducing the publication of a long 1956 letter by Franco Modigliani (FM) to Paolo Sylos Labini (PSL) on the draft of PSL's book, Oligopoly and Technical Progress, the paper critically reviews the theoretical background of FM's comments, showing how the pre-Keynesian roots dominate the...