The article investigates Wicksell's change of mind about the machinery question between 1890 and 1900/1901. Wicksell at first sided with the so-called “compensation theory” that workers are not harmed by the introduction of machinery. In his lecture notes of April 1900, made available here...

Knut Wicksell's concept of the natural (or neutral) rate of interest, introduced between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, has played an important role in modern monetary macroeconomics, especially after the development of inflation targeting policy in the 1990s. More...

In June 1961 the American economist Douglass North visited Brazil for 3 weeks, for a mission organized by the US State Department and Instituto Brasileiro de Economia (IBRE-FGV). The goals of North's Brazilian mission were to evaluate Sudene's plans for the Northeast - which involved meeting...

Samuelson kept optimization-based problems separated from macroeconomic dynamics in his Foundations, where dynamics were defined in terms of difference and differential equations. Despite some criticism of his "correspondence principle" of stability analysis by D.F. Gordon, D. Patinkin and...

The paper investigates the role played by Friedman’s interpretation of the Brazilian inflation in his 1967 formulation of the natural rate hypothesis and in his 1976 discussion of indexation and other institutional arrangements in the face of chronic inflation. It is argued that, as an...

The origins of "capital fundamentalism' - the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth - have been often ascribed to H arrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the output-capital ratio. I t is...

Lewis argued that his 1954 model of economic development in a dual economy was based on the classical framework originally advanced by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. The present paper provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis adopted and adapted classical concepts such as...

The paper provides a narrative of the effort to develop a structuralist macroeconomic model in Latin America, as seen through the eyes of Chilean economist Osvaldo Sunkel (b. 1929). Sunkel faced the problem of how to model structuralism, an indigenous Latin American contribution to economics and...

Evsey Domar put forward in a couple of articles in the 1940s a "guaranteed income growth proposal." For the first time in macroeconomics, economic policy was supposed to work merely through the impact of its announcement on expectations. He claimed that optimistic expectations of income growth...

Joan Robinson’s infatuation with Mao’s China remains the most controversial episode of the Cambridge economist’s life. Drawing on the literatures on observation in science and economics, and economists’ travels, we aim at overcoming the dichotomy between Robinson as a ‘political...