Virtually all of contemporary macroeconomics is underpinned by a Phillips curve of one variety or another, and this volume collects for the first time the major works of one of the great economists. In addition to twelve substantive pieces, twenty-nine economists including Lawrence Klein, James Meade, Thomas Sargent, Peter Phillips, David Hendry, William Baumol, Richard Lipsey and Geoffrey Harcourt highlight and interpret Phillips' ongoing influence. This volume also contains six of Phillips' previously unpublished essays, four of which were long thought to have been lost.

Virtually all of contemporary macroeconomics is underpinned by a Phillips curve of one variety or another; yet most of this literature displays a curious neglect of the theoretical dynamic stabilisation perspective provided by A. W. H. Phillips. This 2000 volume collected for the first time the major work of one of the great economists, integrating Phillips's empirical work with his theoretical contribution. In addition to twelve substantive chapters, twenty-nine economists including Lawrence Klein, James Meade, Thomas Sargent, Peter Phillips, David Hendry, William Baumol, Richard Lipsey and Geoffrey Harcourt highlight and interpret Phillips's ongoing influence. This volume also contains six of Phillips's previously unpublished essays, four of which were thought to have been lost. The fifth such essay (Phillips's second empirical Phillips curve) was previously an informal working paper of which few copies circulated, and the sixth essay is a forerunner of the Lucas Critique written by Phillips shortly before his death.

The Phillips Curve is world famous amongst economists. The man who invented it was an inventor, an engineer, a genius, who led an exciting life and contributed to economics in many different ways. Born and brought up on a remote farm in rural New Zealand, his early life was a search for adventure. He invented toys and rebuilt machinery as a child. He experienced the rigours of the Great Depression on construction sites, and while still a young man he roamed the outback of Australia picking up casual work, sometimes working in gold mines, sometimes crocodile hunting. In 1937 he set off to discover militarising Japan, a guerrilla war in Manchuria, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the tensions in Europe. On the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF and was sent to Singapore where he rearmed planes but was eventually incarcerated in a POW camp by the Japanese. In camp he learned languages, invented gadgets for the troops and built a clandestine radio. If his first 30 years had been a search for adventure, his later life was a search for economic stability. Back in Britain after the war, he scraped through a sociology degree at the LSE, before convincing a sceptical faculty to let him build a hydraulic model of the economy. This beautiful complex machine was a great success and put Bill Phillips on the track of serious economics. In the next few decades he developed new ideas for stabilising economies, was one of the first to use electronic computers, developed the Phillips Curve, showed ways to help an economy to grow, and developed new techniques to model economies. Always innovative, he took another heading in his later years, working out how to stabilise the Chinese economy which was being wracked by the Cultural Revolution. Bill Phillips pioneered a dozen new directions in economics, making him one of the most innovative and influential of our economic pioneers.

Acclaimed by Joseph Schumpeter as ‘The greatest economist the United States has ever produced’, this book examines the life and work of American economist and statistician Irving Fisher (1867–1947). Fisher’s reputation suffered for decades after his incorrect predictions for the stock market in October 1929 and the impact of Keynesian macroeconomics, but the importance of his work came to be recognized through the advocacy of many prestigious scholars including Milton Friedman, Hyman Minsky and James Tobin. With pivotal contributions including his Debt-Deflation Theory, Fisher Diagram and Ideal Index Number, his research in neoclassical economics influenced policymaking in his own day as well as during the recent financial crisis. This volume will be of interest to all those interested in the twentieth century transformation of economics.

The London School of Economics (LSE) has been and continues to be one of the most important global centres for economics. With six chapters on themes in LSE economics and 29 chapters on the lives and work of LSE economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the School, how it produced some of the world’s best-known economists, including Lionel Robbins and Bill Phillips, plus Nobel Prize winners, such as Friedrich Hayek, John Hicks and Christopher Pissarides, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with the first in-depth analysis of LSE economics.

This biography of the applied English economist Arthur (A.J.) Brown, an English economist from the late 1930s to the 1980s, sets his work in the context of the Great Depression, the emergence of Oxford University as a centre of applied economic research, the contraction of British colonialism in Africa, the enlarging of the UK university system, the post –war arms race, the UK joining the Common Market, and significant changes in the industrial structure of Britain.