Critical Essay on Modern Macroeconomic - Softcover

In the early 1980s, rational expectations and new classical economics dominated macroeconomic theory. This essay evolved from the authors' profound disagreement with that trend. It demonstrates not only how the new classical view got macroeconomics wrong, but also how to go about doing macroeconomics the right way.Hahn and Solow argue that what was originally offered as a normative model based on perfect foresight and universal perfect competition has been almost casually transformed into a model for interpreting real macroeconomic behavior. After explaining microeconomic foundations, the authors introduce a better macro model, one that can say useful things about the fluctuation of employment, the correlation between wages and employment, and the role for corrective monetary policy.

Frank Hahn is Professor Ordinario, University of Siena, Professor Emeritus of Cambridge University, and Fellow of Churchill College. Robert Solow is Institute Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987 for his macroeconomic research linking technology and growth.