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This contribution examines Sismondi's money, banking and credit theories and explores his public debt analysis (1803–1838) to connect the instability of market economy with his vision of the social contract. A detailed analysis is offered of the evolution in Sismondi's opinion on the nature of money and the banking system, and the part it plays in his trade cycle theory. Sismondi's monetary thought is then contextualised with a discussion of his policy-mix in relation to the Napoleonic war financing in Continental Europe. Connections with the upcoming flood of literature in England on the bullion controversy are also offered. Remarks are then suggested on the progressive emergence of an "art of public borrowing" according to which the people who provide the money also control the government. Finally, some reflections are proposed on the explicit connection established by Sismondi between budget deficits, the (ab-)use of inconvertible paper money and the partial collapse of the social contract initiated by banks and the governments using it. The entrenched instability of a market economy (discussed in an earlier article) is reinforced by the banking/credit system that works along similar line than any wealth-producing firm. Hence, thanks to the financial system, wealth does grow faster but at the expense of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As soon as 1932, Jan Tinbergen proposed an explanation of the Great Depression based on a specific treatment of unstable processes and multiple equilibria. After his involvement in the early meetings of the Econometric Society, he worked on different dynamic models accounting for this instability. In 1934, he built a macrodynamic model generating new types of economic movements that did not return to a stationary state. This led him in 1936 to consider the possibility of having two equilibria, with damped or self-sustained cycles around the high equilibrium and a collapse around the low equilibrium. Tinbergen saw these models, with reference to Irving Fisher's 1933 paper, as a way to interpret the potential of a crisis to trigger the collapse of the economy. In the end, it turns out that Tinbergen managed to extend the perspective for the study of the business cycle mechanism to non cyclical behaviours which, strikingly, remains almost totally ignored in most histories of macroeconomics and econometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the I European Journal of the History of Economic Thought i (EJHET) and the I European Society for the History of Economic Thought i (ESHET) launched the initiative to publish a special annual issue of EJHET with a selection of papers presented at the ESHET conference of the year before. The 24th annual ESHET conference took place at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE) at Sofia, Bulgaria, from 8 to 10 October 2021. Carret's article is followed by the verbatim records of a roundtable discussion, which took place during the ESHET conference in Sofia, about a highly prominent and controversial attempt to eliminate the divide between microdynamics and macrodynamics. [Extracted from the article]

Hyman Minsky's and Friedrich Hayek's theories on the business cycle are often regarded as fundamentally divergent even when they share certain points in common: while Minsky attributes the cause of economic fluctuations to the inherently speculative tendencies of financial markets, Hayek blames central banks for credit manipulation. This paper aims to demonstrate that the similarities between both authors are greater than generally believed and that actually some consensus exists in their writings: both authors think that the economic boom is the result of an unsustainable credit expansion and that the depression can be explained by financial or, ultimately, real constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While located at the University of Chicago, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics advanced a distinctive "Cowles Commission approach" to macroeconomic modelling, using maximum likelihood methods to estimate structurally-identified Keynesian simultaneous-equations models, with the methods presented in two Cowles monographs edited or co-edited by Tjalling Koopmans, a pioneering implementation in another Cowles monograph by Lawrence Klein, and a polemical contrast with the earlier NBER approach in Koopmans's "Measurement Without Theory" critique of Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell. The Cowles approach to empirical methodology was vigorously contested at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman (a former student of Burns and Mitchell), notably in Cowles seminars, in a defence of "Wesley Mitchell as an Economic Theorist" and at a 1949 NBER conference on business cycles. This paper examines the two contrasting approaches to empirical economics at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at the confrontations and exchanges between the two approaches, which contributed to the 1955 move of Cowles from Chicago to Yale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chandra further contends that many later development economists, although taking Young as their starting point, "misunderstood the basic message that increasing returns are facilitated in a well-functioning market, not in an anti-market framework" (120). Chapter 4, discussing Young's work on growth theory - a field in which he made a seminal contribution (Young [3]) -, is perhaps the most illuminating part of the book. In this field as in others, Young conceived of pure analysis and practical economics as inseparable from one another - an aspect of his thought that is more generally discussed in Chapter 3 on Young's methodology. [Extracted from the article]

In a later model Tinbergen did demonstrate that a sufficiently big positive shock might push the economy onto a different, more desirable, equilibrium path. Nor do they examine Tinbergen's idea that that the construction of a different institutional order was fundamental to Tinbergen's perspective on stability (Dekker [1], [2]). The Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen was most willing to explore the instability implied by his models. [Extracted from the article]

It will not have slipped the minds of those who studied the work and life of John Maynard Keynes that Clark worked with him in Cambridge and provided him with statistical data. Another interesting story is that Clark became what Millmow calls a "Vatican economist" (293). While Clark repeatedly claimed that Keynes had proved him right on this, Millmow provides evidence that Keynes's alleged approval is dubious (326-332). [Extracted from the article]