ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The origins, development and failure of R. W Clower's stock-flow general equilibrium program
Author: Plassard Romain
This paper offers a detailed presentation of an unknown project to microfound Keynesian macroeconomics. The project was supported by R.W Clower, in the 1950s. This economist is very often reduced to his frontal opposition to the Walrasian theory and his seminal work in disequilibrium economics (1965). Here, the Walrasian general equilibrium theory was his base camp. And the originality of his approach lied in his attempt to incorporate stocks and flows to this framework, not in the study of disequilibrium. This project has been ignored thus far because it is almost impossible to capture without knowing Clower’s doctoral dissertation (1952). Thanks to a careful analysis of this unpublished document, I show that the “stock-flow” models constituted a step in a project aiming at giving sound foundations to a theory of capital accumulation inspired by J.M Keynes (1936) and supposed to include the models of R.F Harrod (1939) and J.R Hicks (1950) as special cases. First, I emphasize the microfoundation program underlying the doctoral dissertation. Second, I present the resulting “stock-flow” models. Third, I show that Clower and his mathematician colleague D. Bushaw studied their logical properties to know whether or not they could be adequate to ground the macromodel of the dissertation. Fourth, I note the failure and explain why the “stock-flow” general equilibrium models could hardly be a relevant interface with Keynesian macroeconomics.
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