Kalecki's opus has been acknowledged chiefly as a contribution to the theory of distribution and the business cycle. Little attention has been given to the theory of effective demand and to unemployment equilibrium, i.e. to the field traditionally covered by Keynesian economics. This book is an attempt to draw attention to the most innovative core of Kalecki's thought on capitalist economies, which is also strictly interrelated to the history of economic thought. Accordingly, it focuses on the relationships with other theoretical approaches, to methodology and the theory of effective demand and investment, to the theory of distribution and prices, and to the theory of money.

Unemployment, Recession and Effective Demand is a fine example of how critical analysis and debate about fundamental issues should be carried on. Claudio Sardoni does not pull his punches, but he criticises with courtesy in a learned and fair-minded way. His writings are a role model of proper procedure allied with cumulative persuasion through weight of evidence, sound scholarship and argument.' - From the foreword by G.C. Harcourt In the midst of the current world economic crisis, many claim there is a necessity to return to the Marxian and Keynesian traditions in order to better understand the dynamics of market economies. This book is an important step in that direction. It presents a critical examination of the foundations of macroeconomics as developed in the traditions of Marx, Keynes and Kalecki, which are contrasted with the current mainstream. Particular attention is given to the problem of market forms and their relevance for macroeconomics. Professional economists and postgraduate students in economics, in particular those concerned with macroeconomics and the history of economic thought in the 20th century, will find this insightful resource invaluable. This book should be required reading for a large proportion of the economics profession who are dissatisfied with the mainstream.

One of the reasons which make the Keynesian controversy still so live, is the missing distinction between aspects concerning methodology and others pertaining to theory. Another cause of the ongoing debate is to be found in unsettled problems concerning methodology, in primis the concept the equilibrium. Nor could the situation have been different, given, on the one hand, Keynes's manifest disaffection with these matters (especially in The General Theory) and, on the other hand, their implications as regards Keynesian economic theory and policy. The aim of this volume ensues from this analysis; accordingly, a wide spectrum of questions of method are considered and different interpretations of Keynes's approach in this field are taken into consideration.

Dissatisfied with the explanations of the business cycle provided by the Keynesian, monetarist, New Keynesian, and real business cycle schools, Edmund Phelps has developed from various existing strands-some modern and some classical--a radically different theory to account for the long periods of unemployment that have dogged the economies of the United States and Western Europe since the early 1970s. Phelps sees secular shifts and long swings of the unemployment rate as structural in nature. That is, they are typically the result of movements in the natural rate of unemployment (to which the equilibrium path is always tending) rather than of long-persisting deviations around a natural rate itself impervious to changing structure. What has been lacking is a "structuralist" theory of how the natural rate is disturbed by real demand and supply shocks, foreign and domestic, and the adjustments they set in motion. To study the determination of the natural rate path, Phelps constructs three stylized general equilibrium models, each one built around a distinct kind of asset in which firms invest and which is important for the hiring decision. An element of these models is the modern economics of the labor market whereby firms, in seeking to dampen their employees' propensities to quit and shirk, drive wages above market-clearing levels-the phenomenon of the "incentive wage"--and so generate involuntary unemployment in labor-market equilibrium. Another element is the capital market, where interest rates are disturbed by demand and supply shocks such as shifts in profitability, thrift, productivity, and the rate of technical progress and population increase. A general-equilibrium analysis shows how various real shocks, operating through interest rates upon the demand for employees and through the propensity to quit and shirk upon the incentive wage, act upon the natural rate (and thus equilibrium path). In an econometric and historical section, the new theory of economic activity is submitted to certain empirical tests against global postwar data. In the final section the author draws from the theory some suggestions for government policy measures that would best serve to combat structural slumps.

This book focuses on the modeling of the transitions in and out of unemployment, given the stochastic processes that break up jobs and lead to the formation of new jobs, and on the implications of this approach for macroeconomic equilibrium and for the efficiency of the labor market. An equilibrium theory of unemployment assumes that firms and workers maximize their payoffs under rational expectations and that wages are determined to exploit the private gains from trade. This book focuses on the modeling of the transitions in and out of unemployment, given the stochastic processes that break up jobs and lead to the formation of new jobs, and on the implications of this approach for macroeconomic equilibrium and for the efficiency of the labor market. This approach to labor market equilibrium and unemployment has been successful in explaining the determinants of the "natural" rate of unemployment and new data on job and worker flows, in modeling the labor market in equilibrium business cycle and growth models, and in analyzing welfare policy. The second edition contains two new chapters, one on endogenous job destruction and one on search on the job and job-to-job quitting. The rest of the book has been extensively rewritten and, in several cases, simplified.

Providing an overview of the debates which have surrounded employment in the world of economics, this title includes contributions from many experts in the areas of unemployment and macroeconomics.

Post-Keynesian Growth Theory is a collection of 18 articles by Marc Lavoie, published between 1995 and 2020, with an extended foreword by Eckhard Hein. Marc Lavoie’s introduction recalls how he became attracted to the post-Keynesian theory of growth more than 45 years ago and explains how and why this book came about.