Fifteen years after the Global Financial Crisis: Recessions and Business Cycles in the History of Economic Thought
The 26th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) will take place in Liège on 1–3 June 2023. Proposals for papers or sessions on all aspects of the history of economic thought are welcome.
An abstract of about 400 words for a paper and 600 words for a session should be submitted on the conference website no later than 13 February 2023. Decisions will be notified by 31 March 2023.
Note that: a) published papers are not eligible for submission; b) only one conference presentation is allowed per person (but more than one submission may be accepted, if involving co-authors who are also presenting); c) session proposals must conform with standard format (3 papers, 90 minutes).
Theme of the Conference:
Fifteen years after the Global Financial Crisis:Recessions and Business Cycles in the History of Economic Thought
The Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath seriously questioned the models put forward by mainstream macroeconomics to deal with business cycles. These models – labelled Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) – were in particular unable to account for the large, and highly persistent, drop in real activity which characterized the Great Recession. The first response to this challenge was to incorporate significant financial frictions into otherwise standard DSGE models. Some macroeconomists, however, called for a more significant departure from the existing paradigm in order to accommodate the kind of amplifying mechanisms notably suggested by Irving Fisher and Hyman Minsky.
Before Keynes’s General Theory (1936), providing an explanation for the business cycle – and especially for its upper turning point, namely the ‘crisis phase’ – was a central concern in economics. A well-known outcome of the publication of Keynes’s book was to shift the attention of authors away from business cycle fluctuations, and toward the determination of the short-run equilibrium level of employment and income. Business cycle analysis had to wait until the seminal contributions of Lucas (1975) and Kydland and Prescott (1982) to come back to the center stage of economic research. In the meantime, the great stability characterizing the postwar period had led both economists and policymakers alike to believe that the business cycle could be eliminated thanks to well-designed monetary and fiscal
policies. More recently, the so-called ‘Great Moderation’ area (spanning from 1984 to 2008) seemed to hold out the same promise. At the end of both episodes, however, the business cycle came back with a vengeance.
Special attention will be granted to… READ MORE