ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Research on Business Cycles
Author: DAL-PONT LEGRAND Muriel
Chairman of the session / Harald Hagemann 1. A Brief Economic Biography of Clément Juglar (1819-1905) Business Cycles, Credit and Money, Demography Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand• and Ludovic Frobert dalpont@gredeg.cnrs.fr and Ludovic.Frobert@ens-lsh.fr Abstract The objective of that paper is to present a brief biography of Clément Juglar (1819-1905) presenting then his contribution to Political Economy in a global perspective. Indeed, Juglar contributed to Political Economy through various perspectives, with as a physician, a specific background which sometimes might have disturbed his integration among the French liberal group. That paper aims to show the interdependency there is between those various contributions and the importance of the political and intellectual context in which Juglar’s view is deeply rooted. On the one way if it is well known that Juglar was a pioneering contributor of the modern theory of business cycles, nevertheless, and despite what everybody nowadays call “Juglar’s cycle”, his effective contribution to business cycles analysis most of the time is not precisely identified, neither the link(s) with later important work and debates in that same field. On the other way, there is a total neglect of his monetary and credit theory which, for that period, were very original and intuitive. Indeed, his conceptions of money and credit are to some extent very modern: his approach of credit has an endogenous variable, his view on what may be the objective of monetary policy …etc. One also has to notice that Juglar initially grasped the business cycles issue via his competencies in statistics that he first used for investigations in demography and there a clear nexus between his approach as a physician, his contribution to demography as well as with his specific conception of the business cycles. Finally, we can show that his intellectual biography allows revealing the close connection there was between political events and his economic analysis. Discussant: Alain Raybaut 2. Equilibrium and Instability in Leon Dupriez’s Analysis of Economic Movements Cécile Dangel-Hagnauer and Alain Raybaut DEMOS/GREDEG, CNRS and University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis phone: +33 4 93 95 43 43 and 42 68 / fax: +33 4 93 65 37 68 e-mail: hagnauer@unice.fr and raybaut@gredeg.cnrs.fr Abstract The aim of this paper is to provide a general interpretation of the analysis of economic fluctuations that Léon Dupriez developed in his main book, Des Mouvements Economiques Généraux. The book concerns short and long-period economic movements and contains an original conception of the dynamics of the economy as a whole, which deserves close examination. Dupriez, who was trained in statistics in Harvard, makes a systematic use of time series. Nevertheless, he believes that the dynamics at hand cannot be thoroughly captured by observation alone. Accordingly, he begins by an in-depth discussion of traditional theories of overproduction and of existing theories of real or monetary fluctuations. Owing to the flaws he detects in these theories, he proposes his own explanation, rooted in his personal interpretation of Walras’s general equilibrium theory. According to Dupriez, a situation of general equilibrium is by no means achieved in actual economic life. However, due to both generalized interdependencies of industries and rational decision-making, the economic system is engaged in an endless process of tâtonnement, which concerns both exchange and production, leading to the observed cyclical pattern of economic activity. This instability and the rhythm it conveys to economic movements cannot be explained by exogenous disturbances or stochastic shocks. Instability is rather the by-product of the intricate adjustments of institutions and markets, both real and monetary, to continuous change, notably to technical progress. Discussant : Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand 3. A.H. Abbati, D.H. Robertson and J.M. Keynes Yet Another Neglected Contribution to pre-Keynesian Cycle Theory? Pascal Bridel* and J.R. Presley** Abstract It is somewhat surprising why economists in general focus upon a few key players in the development of their subject to the neglect of others; whilst textbooks have this preoccupation with Marshall, Keynes and Friedman many others fail to get even a mention. One such forgotten player in the progress of macroeconomics is A.H. Abbati; other than one commendable article by D. Coppock (1954), Abbati appears only fleetingly as a bit player in the working out of Keynesian economics; he gains a begrudging acknowledgement in Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930, vol. I, p. 154, n.), a fairly generous review by Robertson in The Economic Journal (Robertson, 1932) but otherwise modest attention from Harrod in his biography of Keynes (Harrod, 1951, p. 482, n.) and no mention at all by the more recent formidable biographies of the great man by both Moggridge (1999) and Skidelsky (1983, 1992, 2000). This paper therefore has the major objective of assessing Abbati's role in the working out of the saving/investment relation, his contribution to the discovery and use of effective demand (or what Abbati called final buying) in economic analysis and more generally his influence upon Robertson and Keynes. This paper is divided into three sections; in section one a limited biography of Abbati is given, together with an introduction to his publications and his relations with Robertson and Keynes; section two focuses upon an examination of his contributions to macroeconomics by reference to the similarities or otherwise of his economic ideas and analysis to that of Robertson and Keynes. Section three concludes. Discussant : Cecile Dangel Hagnauer * Centre d’études interdisciplinaires Walras-Pareto, Université de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne-Dorigny (Switzerland). E-mail: Pascal.Bridel@unil.ch ** University of Loughborough (UK) 4. Research Institutes and Debates on Business Cycles in the German Language Area in the Interwar Period Harald Hagemann, University of Hohenheim Abstract Research on business cycles was a dominant theme among German and Austrian economists in the interwar period. This new area of research attracted many of the most brilliant and innovative minds among the younger economists. The theoretical contributions of Haberler, Hayek, Lowe, Lutz, Schumpeter and others are still discussed today. Following the new methods of business cycle research, as they had been developed in the United States by Wesley Mitchell and the National Bureau of Economic Research and particularly by the Harvard University Committee on Economic Research, which published regular reports on the state of the economy from 1919 onwards, empirical research on business cycles became a major issue in German from the mid 1920s onwards. The article investigates research on business cycles at the major research institutes in Germany and Austria in the interwar period. e-mail: hagemann@uni-hohenheim.de Discussant : Richard Arena
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