T he global financial crisis and recession that started in 2007 with the surge of defaults of U.S. subprime mortgages is having a large impact on recent macroeconomic research. The framework of modern macroeconomics that has replaced traditional Keynesian economics since the 1970s has been widely criticized. Many of the criticisms have focused on the assumptions of the representative agent and ...

The workhorse of modern macroeconomics is the New Keynesian model. This model assumes that monetary policy is transmitted through the path of the shortterm nominal interest rate. Money, if it is included at all, is relegated to an inconsequential role in monetary policy analysis. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we summarize the literature on the existence and role of money that is ...

This note outlines and discusses some of the strands in the post-Keynesian literature on business cycles. Most post-Keynesians have focused on endogenously generated cycles, but the mechanism varies: some focus on the goods market, others on financial markets, the labor market, or political intervention. The merits of formal modeling of the cycles have also come in for debate. 1 A slightly vers...

This is a very interesting paper about the role of money in monetary-policy analysis (Nelson (2003)). Ed Nelson is the ideal author of such a paper. He is a master of modern monetary economics, including New Keynesian analysis, being a student of Ben McCallum’s and a coauthor with Ben of some of the pioneering contributions to the New Keynesian literature. Ed is also a master of more traditiona...

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the difference between the mainstream and Keynesian understandings of uncertainty which persists in spite of superficial similarities. It is argued that the difference stems from the mainstream habit of thinking in terms of a full-information benchmark, where uncertainty arises from incomplete information. Degrees of uncertainty (or ambiguity) refer to th...